Francis Dhomont – Jalons
Although he dabbled in music throughout the 1950s, eye-patched French composer Francis Dhomont (born 1926) has, since the early ’60s, devoted himself exclusively to the composition of acousmatic music, which may be thought of as a form of finely detailed sound collage. Jalons, a CD released by Montreal, Canada acousmatic label empreintes DIGITALes in 2003, is a 78-minute survey of Francis’ more recent output, spanning from 1985 to 2001. The eight tracks on this disc range in length from very short to very long, and seamlessly meld both abstract and real world sounds together with extremely deft compositional clarity and virtuosity.
Scratchy marbles, clacking footsteps in a long hall, crowds roaring, clapping and much more flit about the stereo field–overlapping, fading, whizzing past your head, morphing with scads of other-dimensional sound clusters–then collide and fizzle away in the grandest of reverbs. As if all of that weren’t enough, there’s a nice quote for all of you night owls in track four, Studio de Nuit: “[At night,] the mind becomes an instrument of the ear, rather than an instrument of the eye, as it is during the daytime. I suppose at night, millions of years ago, man depended on his ears for survival.”
Label: empreintes DIGITALes Catalog Number: IMED 0365 Format: CD Packaging: Paperboard fold-out in slipccase Tracks: 8 Total Time: 78:17 Country: Canada Released: 2003 More: Electro CD
Text ©2009 Arcane Candy
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