It’s not very long since Paul Dolden immersed the market with three Empreintes DIGITALes CDs simultaneously: L'ivresse de la vitesse 1 & 2, and Seuil de silences. Those CDs consisted of previously released material, albeit remixed by the composer.
This time around Dolden introduces new material. I had the opportunity to pre-view this material on an early stage, as a kind of beta-listener, and it’s very interesting, now, to hear the final result.

I insert the comments I made on the work Entropic Twilights, version 16th January 2004, back in February of 2004, even though they do deal with a first version of the pieces:

So let’s go into Dolden’s own comments on this actual release, and my new observations/reaction:

1 - 4. Entropic Twilights (1997 – 2002): Twilight’s Nomadic Desire [in two parts]; Twilight’s Sleep; Twilight’s Ritual Incantations.

Excerpts from Dolden’s introduction:

After a philosophical reflection, Dolden describes the different origins of his source material, naming “distorted guitars, drum kits, multiple choirs of voices, large orchestras of brass, wind, reed and string instruments, percussion instruments from around the world, Gamelan orchestra instruments, […] tams, saucepans, cocking pots, metal poles, metal plates, […] wheel rims”.

He then explains how he utilizes this rich material:

Wow! This makes me tired, to tell the truth. I appreciate a very transparent, sparse tonal web which makes good artistic do with ascetic material, which opens up for deep breathing and calm reflection, and I always advocate – with composers of electro-acoustic music – the basic need for omissions, for leaving all but a few ingredients out. This is in fact my recipe for interesting audio art, i.e. the will and capacity to discriminate between the innumerable possibilities of easily accessible hard- and software and just grab a handful of choices – and here comes Dolden with an opposite perspective. This makes listening extra hard for me, because I am opposed to the very nature of Dolden’s way of making music. However, I’m not such a fool that I don’t realize that Dolden is an artist who simply has another idea of audio art than I do, and I’m not foolish enough, either, not to respect his art through hard listening.

With those reservations in mind, I will travel Dolden’s music and see what transpires, trying to put aside my aversion for dense and amassed sound masses and speed-freak progressions…

The beginning, on a mighty, embellished chord opens a fairytale landscape; snow glistening on spruce trees and goblins treading the trail. Somehow I’m reminded of early Jon Appleton stuff. When the syrup guitars sweep the soundscape with gluey gestures, I sit back and feel a little more relaxed with Dolden.
At that point the music turns down the lamp a little, and the sounds recede far away, from whence, however, they do reappear, (and this is repeated a number of times, in a slow wave motion) in sturdy footsteps across the score, in glary, storefront sounds in the vein of Swedish-American composer Bill Brunson (whose style I find too polished, with too much gesture without content, I might say, which is why I haven’t felt able to review his latest CD; I don’t like to immerse myself in negative feelings…). It is a nuance different, though, with Paul Dolden, because even though I have to make an extra effort to sift through his art, I can’t define him as slick or anything, like Brunson. He has many other nuances to his music than just varnish and surface, so let’s continue listening!

The music slowly falls apart, here and there, disintegrating, falls out of time, staggers like a drunkard into an alley – and these are interesting moments, which clearly sets this composer well apart from a dilettante like William Brunson – whom I won’t mention hereafter!

I’d wish, though, that Dolden would get more, much more – out of hand, out of whack, because the tension that rises when the beat misses and the drag causes serious friction between disparate strands of music are seriously fun and artistically enjoyable. Music falling apart is the music of our days!

The rock beat that Dolden at times uses is dead beat though, completely unsuitable, and I can’t understand why he’d compromise himself like that – but again, it’s his choice, and apparently he finds something in these musically and artistically dead sections… and when they’re relieved by seasick Gamelan percussion, I almost forgive him, because if there is anything I really dig, it’s seasick Gamelan; that is high-end, top-notch pleasure!

At some instances Dolden mimics those symphonic rock bands of the 70s, and I really despise that. I’m so sick of it – but Dolden never stays long in those perverted atmospheres, but gets back at me with real down-home electroacoustic wizardry, coming on in slowly diverging progressions of Morton Subotnick homages, breaking a fast tempo apart into crackling tempi that pull and drag madly!

Thing is, things happen so fast, i.e. the music changes so fast that it doesn’t really have any identity. This music is a fast walk down a big city street, all kinds of impressions craving your attention - and it tires me, makes me weary. This music comes on like a dissociative desease. It’s like American versus European film. There are no good films being made in the United States of America, just as there are no good presidents elected there. U.S. film is just a succession of fast cuts and a sickening affinity for violence, whereas the European film makers are slower, using their senses and their brains, at times leaving the camera on for minutes without a cut – and nobody has to die by the violence of fellow men. In Tarkovskij’s Sacrificatio, for example, there is one shot lasting 14 minutes without a cut. That is something to love. Fragmentation splits the mind, and a lot of this Dolden music does just that, and I really dislike it for that. A poem is worth more than a car. However, the picture isn’t unequivocal, for just as I’ve thought that thought, the composer comes across in the most touching church bell mimicry in a misty glare of electronics that completely hijacks my sense of reality and slingshots me into an Icelandic tale!

The fourth part of Entropic Twilights opens in an old tradition where you feel safe and… European – but the music is too shallow, with too much plastic and too many superficial surfaces. Dolden, however, partly saves his face by letting the music diverge again, falling apart, hither and thither, but into a recognizable reverence to Morton Subotnick and Jon Appleton.

The music gets immensely hectic, desperately hectic, and, yes… comically hectic. What’s he after? Does he want to deafen our hearing, numb our senses? I can’t take that part; it’s so ruthlessly untalented and sick – so I switch over into next piece!


5. The Gravity of Silence. Resonance #5 for flute and tape (1995) (13:44)

Dolden explains that “the interest in this type of work is to create a tape based on simple melodic and harmonic ideas while the soloist repeatedly states the melodic ideas in a simple to very virtuosi manner”.

The contrast with the former catastrophe is startling. Here Dolden introduces a soft, swirling, lyrical music that could come straight out of the heart of Debussy! Admittedly, he can’t refrain from amassing sounds at some points, into higher densities – but he magically falls back into impressionistic waters again, for a while. Here he shows that he can write music that isn’t hysterical or hyped – so why doesn’t he do it more often?
The soft but stubborn layers of flute and tape are at times transparent, like bands of thin textile over your eyes, until the music swells and fills a whole cathedral with sound, the high windows trembling with wave after wave of compressed air.


6. The Heart Tears Itself Apart With the Power Of Its Own Muscle. Resonance #3 for 4 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, 2 double basses and tape (1995) (14:44)

Dolden says, among other things, about this work:

Steve Reich? You could well believe that. It’s a little bit of Tehillim at the outset, voices in layers of clarity – but he says nothing about the vocals in his introduction. Maybe they’re synthesized.
After a beginning that seemed to move into something beautiful and intricate, Dolden throws himself into the gutter again, gathering all kinds of repulsive debris that he compresses into big fat slabs of sonic garbage that he throws at the listener, like he hated him…

So – it’s a mixed bag of audio that Paul Dolden produces on this CD, with some compelling sections of falling-apart audio and seasick Gamelan, but much to my dismay, after I’ve stumbled between hope and despair, most of the music here is – to me – repulsive, untalented and curiously self-destructive, in a North American way… and very, very boring...

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