John Duncan and Mauricio Reyes release ‘Gloomy Sunday: The Funeral I Plan for Myself’
John Duncan and Mauricio Reyes release “Gloomy Sunday: The Funeral I Plan for Myself” via Soleilmoon Recordings, reworking the 1933 song.
American sound artist John Duncan and Mauricio Reyes have released ‘Gloomy Sunday: The Funeral I Plan for Myself’ on Soleilmoon Recordings, a reworking of the 1933 Hungarian song “Gloomy Sunday” built from two of Duncan’s 1991 pieces and a composition he originally wrote for his own funeral. The label has issued it as a single-track CD running close to an hour, alongside a limited special edition.
Reyes approached Duncan in 2024 with the idea of revisiting “Gloomy Sunday,” written by Hungarian pianist and composer RezsÅ‘ Seress in 1933 and long nicknamed the “Hungarian Suicide Song” in press coverage tied to the song’s associated urban legends. Duncan judged that the journalistic angle around the song’s reputation had already been covered extensively elsewhere. He offered Reyes something different instead: segments of “Soundtrack For An Incandescent Departure,” a piece he had originally composed for his own funeral, reshaped alongside material from two of his 1991 works, “Klaar” and “River in Flames.”
Reyes added further material drawn from recordings he located in the Telekinett archives, including a funeral mass recorded in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and a recording referred to on the release as “Sarah’s Letter.” The piece also includes a Spanish-language narrative segment centered on a woman’s fixation on a serial killer imprisoned in Mexico City. Soleilmoon Recordings describes the result as a meditation on mortality and psychological decline rather than a conventional elegy for the original song.
The standard CD edition carries the single, roughly 60-minute title piece. A limited special edition, sold directly through Soleilmoon, is packaged as a funerary box containing photographs, letters and other memorial-style ephemera alongside the disc.
About John Duncan and Mauricio Reyes
John Duncan was born on June 17, 1953, in Wichita, Kansas, and moved to Los Angeles at 19 to study at CalArts. Working within the city’s experimental performance and radio scene through the 1970s, he co-produced “Close Radio” with Paul McCarthy on KPFK and released his debut solo LP, “Organic,” in 1979 on AQM. He relocated to Tokyo in 1982, collaborating with Japanese noise artists and running pirate radio and television broadcasts from city rooftops, before moving to Amsterdam in 1988, where he staged his “Kick” performance series across European venues between 1989 and 1993 and released “Contact,” a collaboration with Andrew M. McKenzie, on Touch in 1990. After periods in Italy and Sweden, Duncan settled in Bologna in 2005, where he has continued to teach audio art and release recordings on labels including Allquestions, iDEAL, Touch and Sub Rosa, among them “The Nazca Transmissions” (2009) and “Bitter Earth” (2016). “Gloomy Sunday: The Funeral I Plan for Myself” draws on two of his 1991 pieces alongside a composition originally written for his own funeral.
Mauricio Reyes originated the “Gloomy Sunday” project in 2024, proposing the reworking to Duncan and contributing archival recordings he located through the Telekinett archives, including a funeral mass recorded in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. “Gloomy Sunday: The Funeral I Plan for Myself” is his first release on Soleilmoon Recordings alongside Duncan.
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