'when you want someone to chill you say: il n'y a pas le feu au lac. very swiss.'
'There Is no Fire in the Lake' is Duncan Harrison's first full length album since 2019.
Hovering between motion and stasis, Harrison tilts his magnifying glass toward the elusive undercurrents of the day-to-day, embracing imperfections and voids within. The physicality of magnetic tape has always been a key component of his approach, but here it becomes a language in itself; the cycling spools and hissing negative space telling tales that lurk just below the surfaces of intelligibility, exhaustion, distance, meaning.
"Times of difficulty."
Sketches that say the unsayable.
Streaks of color in grey sea.
Stare long enough and it begins to take shape.
"Times of feeling put upon."
The circadian whir.
The awful warm gnaw of routine.
The impossibility of finding space to break.
A hint of a streak of sun.
A fleeting embrace.
A moment. A song. A smile.
Too many lives lived in an instant.
Voice. Silence. Hope.
"It’s a case of—"
Through Harrison’s bleary lens, concepts that evade direct identification communicate themselves in deeply personal, almost diaristic fashion. These pieces are also some of his most delicate; moving beyond the baffling, roughshod absurdity of past works into something closer, starker, more calmly glimmering; as if threaded with invisible twines of light and shade.
- Jack Davidson/Duncan Harrison, Summer, 2025
Adhuman, 2025