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

new wavest

 

New Wave eye candy - video special (Kim, Feargal, Toyah)

 

The archetypal New Wave grid pattern

The Home Counties Blondie-ersatz

New Wavey nervous excitation: Feargal's jerky body moves at the chorus enacts the jolting Event that the song is about  - albeit opaquely (what is this song about?) while the rhythm guitar chordage chops against the flow

Did they bring in the horns after seeing Dexys?  The brassy up-ness suits the chorus, and there's that odd, quite-clever bit when the horns slow everything down, before it all revs up again.

And then this - this song, this artist, really deserves a post to itself 

The pogo-stick / Jack-in-a-box boisterousness of the non-dance dancing.

The lyrics!

I'm bored

Don't want to go to school

Don't want to be nobody's fool

Want to be me

Don't want to be sweet and neat

Don't want someone living my life for me

Want to be free

I'm going to turn this world inside out

I'm going to turn suburbia upside down

I'm going to walk the streets, scream and shout

I'm going to crawl through the alleyways, being very loud

Don't want to be told what to wear

As long as you're warm who cares

Want to be me

So what if I dye my hair

I've still got a brain up there

And I'm going to be me

I'm going to be free

Tear down the wallpaper

Turf out the cat

Tear up the carpet

We've got rid of that

Blow up the TV

Blow up the car

Without these things

You don't know where you are

Pull down the abbatoirs

And all that's obscene

Everything in life

Should be totally free

We should live and let live

And all live our dreams

It  has the effect of making all of rock's utopianism and breaking-loose seem like the silliest of playpen tantrums - a fist-shaking sideshow to the real action of people getting on with building the world (or actually destroying it rather than play-acting destruction) 

My favoritest of these very very favorite lyrics:

I'm going to crawl through the alleyways, being very loud

Don't want to be told what to wear

As long as you're warm who cares

So what if I dye my hair

I've still got a brain up there

It's Rik from the Young Ones - but she means it, maaaaan!

So unfathomably bad it must be shown thrice! 

Four times, even 

This was the bigger (s)hit though

Last dregs 

Somewhere between the Antz and Classix Nouveau 

One of the more mystifying cults of all the cults of that time. 

I suppose "I Want To Be Free" is only a rewrite of this

Mind you, that might be my least favorite Sex Pistols song - out of the songs sung by Johnny Rotten, at least 

But it's still about 1000% times realer than the hammy histrione 

Some kinder comments I made about la Toyah Wackson in a post about shrieky females of the New Wave era:

And then the warrior-chieftainess of suburban postpunk - Toyah Wilcox, whose band  - Toyah - were originally a sort of distaff Adam and the Antz (when the band had a 'Z' on the end) with indie-chart big seller Sheep Farming In Barnet -

Then she followed the trail blazed by Adam and the Ants (with a S on the end now -- less cultic and underground in vybe, more open for teenybop business)  into pop and the UK hit parade

Revealingly, she was originally, and remained primarily an actress  - Derek Jarman's Jubilee and The Tempest,  films, big theatre roles in stage productions by cutting-edge street-raw playrights,

A sort of thesped up, lisping Siouxsie

Once the missing link between Boadicea and Kirk Brandon.... nowadays she's a charming, oh-so-English, matronly-but-sexy figure, married to Bob Fripp, and what a lovely couple they make 

rave eye candy 1 of ?

mouth music (mirrorbliss)

 

happy yodelmas

 

Not so much looks like a milkmaid as looks like she's made of milk

Well fancy that - she made a record with Basement Jaxx 

Rather nice - she can do the dance diva 

Earlier dancepop effort 

Mad stuff

But prefer the pure "uncut" yodel 

It's actually an ecstatic, excessive sound if you let the associations slide and just go with it. 

Definitely "file under ' extremes of the human voice'" 

Hope Sofia and the people of Ukraine are having an okay Christmas

avian-garde music (4 of ??)

 

Not sure if this cybernetic aviary contains real bird vocalisms processed and treated, or if they are simulations - but it's pretty magical stuff from Dougie from Down Under 

First heard this on the Creel Pone rerelease of 

Or was it actually on this, as sorted out by a pal in Aussieland?

Not sure

This is another good one - no beak music, but mouth music elements

Frog music and bug music - stridulationtronica

Water sounds in this one 

Tinkletastic