I first got in touch with Duro Durcek, aka Avoided back in 2014 when I was conducting a brief series of interviews with electroacoustic musicians from Bratislava. He immediately struck me as genuine and caring, almost idealistic in a way. He only had good things to say about his fellow Slovak colleagues stating that, “One of the reasons I can be at least partly proud for my country is its electronic/experimental music scene.”
As one of the instigators of the Noize Konspiracy collective he encouraged and promoted the work of many talented young musicians who went on to forge successful solo careers within the Slovak underground. He dabbled in different genres himself, bridging the whole spectrum of adventurous music, or as he put it, taking a “Psychedelic journey from metal to pop, through noise and other electronics.” He recorded solo under a variety of different monikers, including deliberately provocative ones, but seemed to enjoy mostly collaborative projects, such as those with fellow conspirators Acid Milk, Twisted and Total Trash.
Notwithstanding his penchant for abrasive sounds, he was a big fan of Loscil, whom he singled out as his all time favorite ambient music producer. Being against any kind of artistic oppression, and as a supporter of freedom in music distribution, he made his whole musical output freely available on Bandcamp.
To paraphrase the last line of the author’s note of one of Duro Durcek’s favorite novels A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick, “Let him play again, in some other way, and let him be happy”.
Duro Durcek 1983 – 2016