John Duncan / Michael Esposito / Z'EV

John Duncan is a divisive figure, having gained notoriety more for his performance art than his musical output. On his Blind Date piece, he purportedly had intercourse with a female corpse before undergoing a vasectomy, although the only documented evidence of this actually happening is auditory in nature. There Must be a Way Across this River is much less psychologically jarring. The piece was performed in a refrigerated basement and includes Duncan's voice, shortwave radio and a room-length loop of open-reel tape. The entire piece sounds as chilling as the room it was conceived in, with bursts of feedback, bleak drones and a frigid whisper. For The Abject, Michael Esposito (a world-renowned expert in Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVP) accompanied Duncan to his childhood home to make some field recordings. The resulting EVP invocations were then handed to Z'EV for post-processing. The Abject's textured drones reveal nothing of the source material, instead sounding like smeared ectoplasm and a ghostly cacophony. Pure, outright dread has never sounded so good.