Paul Dolden and Empreintes DIGITALes throw three new Dolden CDs at us simultaneously, in an unparalleled marketing of one single composer’s work. However, it’s not as strange as it may sound, but really quite an interesting and rewarding venture, because it has to do with reissues of old material, remastered by the composer with modern equipment. Dolden is one of the most prolific electroacousticians, and for sure his oeuvre deserves to be revisited, especially after its recent technical and artistic brush-up.

Paul Dolden explains [a text included in all the three CD jackets and also in all three subsequent reviews by Sonoloco here, since one cannot tell which review a reader stumbles into… and in fact, the whole introduction, until reaching the individual tracks, is identical in all three reviews of this triptych of Dolden’s, so you can jump it if you’ve read another of these three reviews before, and browse directly down to the track reviews]:

1. Below the Walls of Jericho (1988 – 1989)

Dolden:

A quite wonderful, glassy sound, organ-like, subdued-fanfare-like, opens Below the Walls of Jericho. This shiny, honey-dew fluidity develops into standing walls of dense, gray sound – with glittering, glimmering sensations built into to them, dark percussive elements – like falling rocks down a wintry Lapland slope – growing in terrible intensity… until a tiny screw of a sound suddenly lets loose some silence which, however, slips away like the tail of a lizard, leaving us in a magnificence of over-toned, interstellar cruelty, in a realm where all is shine, cold, bright shine… and again – as before, sometimes, with Dolden – I get these icy notions of alien horizons on worlds we know nothing about, and the unknown gathers incredible strength in a pumping, pulsating wheezing of giant properties of alienation; scary headphone adventures!

Surely, this didn’t come across this brightly and ingeniously on the earlier release. I heard it the first time when it appeared on the Cultures Électroniques release from the GMEB competitions in 1990, where it won the composer the first prize for electroacoustic composition. Dolden’s reallocated attention has brought this piece into new luster, new shine. It’s quite amazing, really.

There are many layers of sound relieving each other or adding to each other, and the sheer roughness and simultaneous clarity of some of them bring on levels of corrugated auditory surfaces I have never heard or touched before, bringing me into joyous discovery for the first time in a long listening while, as Dolden actually manages to mix my perceptive senses in hitherto unknown ways, mysteriously; tactility and hearing, vision (bright!) and smell (acrid!). This is a hit!
The rhythmic properties have me gasping for air in a similar way, so strong, manifold, un-ending, loopless, ever into an elusive distance, yet firm on your tympanic membranes and on your skin, your heart beating behind the sound, below your breath, inside a dream…

2. Gravity’s Stillness. Resonance #6 (1996) for violin or viola & tape; Julie-Anne Derome [violin]

Dolden:

A dark motion rising cautiously out of semi-instrumenty realms, emerging into clarity and tactile reality, spreading its auditory fragrance like opening petals… and you feel yourself soaring down inside the space inside these petals, as if docking with a giant space ship – and yet it feels so familiar behind that veil of uncertainty and semi-transparent reality, the violins, the orchestral familiarity, hundreds of years of tradition carried towards you on outspread fingertips, like a gift from undisclosed benefactors…
There are some incredibly close encounters herein, with the strings, which you practically ride, trembling madly with them… only to find yourself suddenly distanced into the room, the strings grouping themselves neatly into an ensemble up on a little stage.. and then you’re down into the instruments again, the strings of the violin fully charged high-voltage transmission lines through your vicinity; danger!
Dolden mixes these two aspects seamlessly, this closing in and distancing, this old tradition ensemble familiarity and this latter day electronic havoc! Splendid! Julie-Anne Derome makes a thrilling contribution!

3. Caught in an Octagon of Unaccustomed Light (1987 – 1988)

Dolden:

It’s hammer time right off, as you veer here and veer there… eventually catching hold of some materializing matter in the shape of sturdy tools inside a machine-scape of some industrial environment, as the industrial sounds re-group into Christmas time Santa workshops of speedily constructed toys and half-perverted goblins by endless conveyor belts… and it’s a Disney culture gone seriously wrong.
After a while a peculiar, metallic percussion, irregular, brings on reminiscences of Harry Partch and John Cage, and I feel right at home in my intellectual, academic predispositions… but it wouldn’t be like Dolden not to amass things, though between these moments of catharsis he lets little details build strange, twiggy, thorny environments to scratch yourself bloody on if you don’t watch it!
The slow, spacious anonymities that Dolden sometimes allows for in this piece, almost inwardly thoughtful in a roomy, thin gamelan, result in generously emitted beauty of sound that I bathe my perception in, like when nocturnal flakes of snow fall through the circle of light of a street lamp, when the town is sleeping silently; these cold crystals melting on your cheek.

4. The Vertigo of Ritualized Frenzy. Resonance #4 (1996) for reed instrument and/or piano (or accordion) & tape; François Houle [clarinet]; Leslie Wyber [piano]

Dolden:

The inconspicuous beginning mix of roughness and timbral modality builds up strong levels of conviction, so watch your output levels. A playful melody, sort of heard from way inside a hall, or from behind a corner in a restaurant, reveals where the musicians are poking about in there scores, kind of nervously and absentmindedly, a half hour before they have to start playing for real, for pay. There is a distance in the way Dolden has smeared the sounds across a wall quite far away, across the dancing floor. The music itself is semi-jazzy, semi-cocktail-party-licked, easy going, swirling about in short, close motions, never traveling too far off from the instruments that produce the sounds observed.

5. In the Natural Doorway I Crouch (1986 – 1987)

Dolden:

This piece was one of the first Dolden works I heard, on Cultures Électroniques Volume 3, presenting the winners from the Bourges competitions of 1988. It’s probably one of his most spread works too. I’ve come across it here and there.
To begin with it has a spooky conversational quality, the likeness of voices soaring about inside instrumental and/or electronic sounds, as if matter was raising its jittery subatomic voice to the level of human hearing, just to scare us real good at last…
The flakes of sound are heavy in the void, tumbling about like forlorn celestial debris, traveling like that forever, or maybe one day crashing down on unsuspecting civilizations on blue spheres in revolving spiral galaxies, cutting everything very short…

Morse-like percussive codes are emitted from inside the body of sound; trembling, shivering cries of beings lost behind malevolent horizons, divide from us by impossible gaps in time and space and simultaneity…

There is an ominous, fateful feel to this work, as if it was describing events so vast and so immensely forceful that acceptance is the sole possible attitude from our point of view. This music seems to deal with the inevitability of the sun eventually turning into a red giant, or events like that, or perhaps with the natural loneliness of the soul – and one feels, as a reaction to Dolden’s music, an urge to escape existence in matter to existence in spirit, which is all there really is to hope for; and wouldn’t it be nice to cut this endless hunt for sub-atomic particles short, realizing with the string theorists that all is vibrations of different frequencies, also confirming the conviction of Stockhausen and others of a celestial music; the universe understood as an endless composition…