c'était demain (RIP Francis Dhomont)

Aloysius on Dhomont:

"When he was asked to create a work celebrating musique concrete’s 50th anniversary, Francis Dhomont was uniquely qualified for the job. He’d experimented with a kind of proto-concrete before the term existed, and had been quietly present for all the discoveries and conflicts that arose along the expedition led by Pierre Schaeffer. One of the central recurring motifs in “Cycle of Sound” is a sequence lifted from the opening seconds of Schaeffer’s “Etude in Objects”. What’s striking is how Dhomont takes these sound objects, now rusty ancient museum pieces, and enchants them into a shimmering material which casts unpredictable trails of light in its wake. It’s a beautiful effect which elevates the original sounds to a higher plane. The cycle is dedicated to “musique concrete’s unfortunate creator”, which itself is a quotation… it’s how Schaeffer, the burningly curious yet forever disappointed explorer, once referred to himself. With this context in mind, Dhomont’s magician tricks with Schaeffer’s sounds feel like a touching rebuttal to the latter’s pessimism, a way of saying, “Don't despair! Look how far we’ve come, thanks to the possibilities you opened up!” The work is rich with other allusions, like the spooky recurring presence of medieval choral music (probably related to Dhomont’s contention that musique concrete was the Ars Nova of the 20th century), and a drone passage interrupted by blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flashbacks to classic works of concrete—ephemeral yet potent phantoms. A former student of Nadia Boulenger, Dhomont absorbed both the aesthetics of the “old world” and European modernism through lived experience. While the initial impression that “Cycle of Sound” generates is one of blinding futurism and alienness, the work's inventiveness is inseparable from the cultural erudition and lived memory that went into it."

 

97!

Coiner of the term "Cinéma pour l’oreille" 

French, but sometimes described as Canadian, as he lived and worked in Quebec for a long period

Interestingly, in this 2006 interview with Computer Music Journal, Francis Dhomont says that he independently arrived at musique concrete techniques at the same time as Pierre Schaeffer, quite unawares. And both of them used other methods before adopting tape as the medium: 

"One can produce musique concrete with any medium; despite the fact that it's made with computers, it's still musique concrete. It used to be tape recorders-it was always done with a support medium. Pierre Schaeffer used the flexible disks with needles . .. that was the first thing. I started around the same time as him - without knowing him - but I worked with a Webster sound recorder (an American brand) with a magnetic wire. It was a wire made of very thin steel. I had a roll of it. It sat over at the side, I would pull some out, and then I would record on it. Magnetic wire had been invented a long time prior by Valdemar Poulsen, and this Webster was meant for businesspeople - an early kind of Dictaphone. I found it in the years just after the war; the Americans came over not only with guns but also with recorders! The uncle of one of my friends had one; he worked with an American firm. I experimented a bit with it and thought it quite fantastic. So I started working with one, making musique concrete, without knowing that musique concrete already existed.... It would have been between 1946 and 1948. I would have been 20-22 years old."

So he was doing stuff with wire-recorder at nearly the same time as the chap in Egypt, Halim El-Dabh.  

Fragments from Dhomont's write-up for  “…et autres utopies” –

"these aural mirages...  creatures of illusion... these  aural ‘non-lieux’, these chimeras of perception, resulting from treatments and made from unlikely parts that are losing their identity... are fictional beings born out of a dreamer’s nomadic invention. … attempting to avoid traditional music codes, disregarding their imperatives, and offering a stream of mental images to our psyche.... ”

A literary dude, like so many of these French concrete types, e.g. 

this track, inspired by the "Old Ocean!" section of Lautreamont's Chants du Maldoror!

A detailed fan breakdown / evocation of that album here, with Dhomont quotes