Acousmastrix 8/9

構成数 : 2枚
合計収録時間 : 00:00:00
Includes a 200 page book. Obscure in America, a virtual legend in France and the rest of Europe, electro-acoustic composer Francis Dhomont is the subject of this tribute assembled by Francois Denis. Essentially divide the two cycles into developmental periods in the composer's work, comprised of a total of seven major works. Nothing from Dhomont's earliest period of "traditional" composition is represented, only his acousmatic, electro-acoustic, and musique concrete works are included. They range from the hyper-abstract 1982 work "Pointe de Fuite" (Vanishing Points), where the subjects -- either the musicians themselves or the listener -- moves through life's abstractions and events telekinetically: motion, depth, love, challenge, travel, death, through sense impression. The scores are notated in different colors and graphs, architectural drawings, scribbled densities, and lines with degrees of ascent or descent. Since this music is played and then assembled to be performed with recording tape, all semblances of traditional instrumentation are blurred, signified by pitch and tone only, and even this is a guess. On "...mourir un peu," completed in 1987, the ambience of tape as it fuses one segment to another (there are 11) is remarkable; sounds introduce themselves as motion, through the prism of a body or bodies engaged in farewells, departures. It uses elements from "Pointe de Fuite" to create an oscillation between the spaces imparted by greetings and passages or goodbyes. They are notated by sweeping washes of warm sound and scratchy sinewaves intermingling in the middle of the composition's body. They create a sensation -- if not a feeling -- of mourning, emptiness, loneliness. On 1989's "Espace/Escape," the cycle reaches its nadir: death (as signified sonically by the sound of a heart monitor going flatline) and resurrection from the body into the world of the spirit -- the heart monitor echoes into silence, a sweeping sound of air and the crank of cable signify an upward, outward movement of the soul from the body. From here, nothing is physical anymore; everything is perception and ambiguity. The shifts -- as in the bardo states (in between death and rebirth) of Tibetan Buddhism -- create large dislocations in the consciousness of the individual as it meshes, grates, and converges with that of the universe; everything is in flux, finally, as a cello enters from the beyond, the evidence of return and embrace becomes paramount; the sonics created by tape and distorted instruments are warmer, fluid, full more of silence than matter. Finally, a rhythm, identifiable and prominent, reveals the entry of the soul into its next phase. On disc two, "The Drift of the Sign," four compositions between 1986 and 1989 are offered to signify Dhomont's preoccupation with the body and the consciousness as a set of signifiers seeking the signified. His linguistic concerns are shared by many composers who came to maturity during the era of literary critic Roland Barthes -- only in France would a literary critic influence everything from experimental to popular music). The music on "Novars," "Chairoscuro," "Meteores," and "Signe Dionysos" is rooted more in meditative spaces on the topic of how pervasive the search for these signifiers can be. These are metaphors for spiritual life. In using everything from electric guitars to strings, brass, woodwinds, synthesizers, and tape, then cutting, pasting, and absorbing everything into a set of musically taped "events," listeners are possessed of a logic that identifies the seeker (signifier) with what she or he seeks through cosmology, sensation, and even the spiritual event itself. It's true, these pieces have been assembled as a manifesto of Dhomont's acousmatic method, where computer and human are entwined in a dance of perpetual give and take, but the individual works are melded together to offer these themes as their guideposts in coming together. The fact that the work ends with "Signe Dion