Between Intrigue and Fascination
by Jacques Tremblay |imed_0897-0001|
he main theme running through all three of the works included on this CD
is otherness. Each piece illustrates different facets of this theme.
O the irony! As I try to fold back around my memories, my ability to focus
is suddenly challenged by my noisy neighbour going by and talking loudly into
his cell phone headset.
The noise of this undesired speech immediately ties up my memory. This
foreign tongue and its strong accents are heckling me. However, I persist in
writing, which soon relegates the surrounding audio flow to the background.
Since I cannot grasp the meaning of the words, my neighbour’s conversation
becomes beat, movement, pace. And my listening finds purchase on the
musicality of the sound.
Later, when I resume my active listening, I realize that elsewhere in the
background, over my head in fact, the patrons of the fruit store are ‘pacing
around,’ influenced by the ebb of a radio, whose sound reaches me through the
floor/ceiling in a highly-filtered form.
Finally, further in the background is an animated layer of vehicle sounds
pulsated by the clock mounted on the wall… An Arabian song comes from a car,
panning from left to right… Multiplicity is here and now and… My attitude
hesitates between shutting it all out or marveling at it.
I listen… looking from the inside out… and rather than closing itself up,
my perception tries to feed off these sonic imprints.
The above sums up pretty well how I found my pace in realizing these
works. My vision extrapolated into numerous ramifications along the way. My
attention still thought it was focusing on a familiar sound, but it was
actually slipping into the chronicles of intrigue and fascination. And for
this experience, the ‘I’ becomes the ‘other.’ And being able to dissociate
oneself from it is strangely fascinating.
Isn’t that part of the Other’s seductive power? This very otherness holds
the power to awake us, dust down our old ready-to-ware suits/ideas,
initiating a new fresh attitude toward astonishment and discovery.
Jacques Tremblay [English
translation: François Couture, viii-08]
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