Francis Dhomont: Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (CD): liner notes

Sous le regard d’un soleil noir

Francis Dhomont

Sous le regard d’un soleil noir

[Under the Glare of a Black Sun]

empreintes DIGITALes | IMED 9633 | 1996

CD 25.00 CA$

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Shared Abysses

by Jean-Jacques Nattiez |imed_9633-0001|

“Each man in all men
All men in each man.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

I often wondered why I am so touched by Sous le regard d’un soleil noir, by Francis Dhomont, since in general, I feel little esthetic affinity with electroacoustic works. Perhaps because, beyond the musical proposition, it leads us into the abysses of human psychology and the depths of the divided self. It is explicitly inspired by the writings of the English specialist in schizophrenia, Ronald D Laing.

A program work, this poem by Dhomont is not ashamed of the musical genre to which it belongs: it tells a story, a slow descent towards madness. The title of at least three sections reveals an illustrative connection with Laing’s theory: Engloutissement (Engulfment), Implosion (Implosion), Pétrification (Petrification), and I have little doubt that Dhomont wished to give them musical equivalents: the murmuring of water, empty and obsessive octaves, sonorous ores.

As a matter of fact, when looking at it closely, Laing’s work calls for a musical extension. Of course, here we are dealing with theoretical books, where plays on words quickly become ‘sound inanities’ (as Rimbaud would have said) ; in fact the composer does not fail to make the most of them: “I’m an in divide you all” (“I’m an individual”). And in Knots, Laing has translated in a quasi poetic fashion the complex strategies of his patients:

“it hurts Jack
to think
That Jill thinks he is hurting her
by (Jim) being hurt
to think
that she thinks he is hurting her
by making her feel guilty
at hurting him
by (her) thinking
that he is hurting her
by (his) being hurt
to think
that she thinks he is hurting her
by the fact that
da capo sine fine

The musical terminology which concludes this text is significant. In a long six page development (“If it’s not me it’s mine / If it’s mine it’s not me […]”), Laing himself felt the musical resonance of his works, or at least the world which he had recreated. In order to reinforce the vertigo that soon seizes the reader, he adds: “poco a poco accelerando al fine,” and in the very middle, alludes to “an enharmonic change.” In the same text, the conditional if (si in French) becomes obsessive alliteration: did it inspire — with the contamination of Wozzeck — the si — the note now [in French, si is both the conjunction ‘if’ and the note B natural] — around which Dhomont has organized his work? The composer, in any case, did not yield to the facile temptation of a repetitive type of music and succeeded in translating an unbearable mental world into an original sound work.

Of course, it might be interesting to experiment and listen to the musical component of the work without the text quotations which punctuate it, in order to know whether, by itself, it is able to suggest the inner world of the schizophrenic. Dhomont conceived Soleil noir, with its Nerval-like title borrowed from the delirious ramblings of a patient, Julia, and with deliberately audible sentences, as a balanced dosage of sounds and text where the music acquires a precise meaning thanks to the words, and where the words acquire their tragic and experienced resonance thanks to the music.

There lies the eminent virtue of Soleil noir: it makes us share in an immediate manner the anxiety, the anguish, the solitude of the schizophrenic ; a new ‘uninhabitable space,’ it makes us share his distress and his despair. Dhomont’s music presents us with the sonorous image of an inaccessible world and convinces us of its reality.

There is, of course, a paradox since, and Laing said it himself, “I cannot experience your experience, or vice versa.” On the other hand, the composer tells us: ‘I have you listen to the experience that I believe they have,’ and we believe that he tells the truth. Because, with his own musical means, he achieves the same goals as Laing who, by relying on the remarks of his patients and, despite the existentialist conception of incommunicability, presents us with an inner snapshot of this mental world.

Illusion? Perhaps. We will never know.

In fact, Sous le regard d’un soleil noir reaches us through something more essential. Program music did we say ? Yes, but just like the symphonic poems of Liszt took hold of the heroes of Goethe, Byron and Shakespeare, and provided Faust, Mazeppa and Hamlet with their full mythic dimension, Dhomont takes hold of the post-Freudian man, and from the specific case of schizophrenics, constructs a more general myth through which the ‘normal’ man discovers his own schizoid traits. Today as in the romantic era, but in different terms, the divided self is the self of the double man.

This electronic poem therefore fits in a very precise musical tradition, but at the same time utilizes the resources of a contemporary language. I recognize in it the narrative efficiency of the Requiem of Chion and the classicisim of De natura sonorum by Parmegiani: I mean that Dhomont has not deployed the whole gamut of the GRM hardware store, but has used with the utmost economic organization, the only sound combinations necessary to his purpose, therefore making it most efficient.

Beyond schizophrenia, Sous le regard d’un soleil noir tells us about ourselves, about the terrifying solitude that faces everyday man, as if we were sitting at the deepst end of a cavern, only capable of looking straight ahead.

But we are the cavern.

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Montréal, 1982-96 [x-96]


Listening to the Ineffable, A Cycle of Depths (1)

by Francis Dhomont |imed_9633-0002|

In relation to the original recording issued in 1982 (Ina-GRM 9109 dh), this new edition of Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (Under the Glare of a Black Sun) is part of a more ambitious group of works, comparable to my Cycle de l’errance (Cycle of Wanderings) (IMED 9107; IMED 9607), all of which are inspired by psychoanalytic thought: the Cycle des profondeurs (Cycle of Depths).

This cycle is presented, in its current form, as a diptych of which this disc constitues the first part; the second part is a recent composition, Forêt profonde (Deep Forest) — instigated by the book The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim — which serves as another empreintes DIGITALes compact disc release (in coproduction with the Ina-GRM) [IMED 9634].

This form nevertheless remains open and will perhaps be augmented by a third part (thus, a project-in-progress) devoted to the works of Kafka guided by the writings of Marthe Robert.

It is a very old preoccupation of mine, this meeting of the imagination adhering to the ‘psychology of depths’ and the mental images projected by acoustmatic art; what more appropriate, in fact, than this very language for staging, musically, these fantastical representations?

The resources of a morphological vocabulary and its most adventure some associations — which the alchemy of the studio permits — procure for the ‘acousmate’ a power of auditory suggestion capable of expressing the inexpressable unconscious.

Furthermore, in one case as in another, it is about exploring the domain of archetypes.

Francis Dhomont, Montréal [x-96]

Francis Dhomont: Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (CD): liner notes

Prices are in Canadian dollars — 1.00 CA$ ~ 0.98 US$ ~ 0.71 € ~ 0.65 £ ~ 88.83 ¥ ~ 1.7 AU$ ~ 5.31 DKK ~ 5.72 NOK ~ 6.92 SEK — and include handling, shipping and applicable taxes.


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