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Dominique Bassal; It was an interesting surprise to receive this issue for reviewing from Empreintes DIGITALes on a high-quality dvd audio, since I got this set from the composer a few years ago, in an earlier guise on a home-burnt cdr. I provide my text for this earlier version here in extenso, albeit with a few omissions of statements that have fallen for the axe of time, and with a few additions brought on by the reviewer’s hopefully extended experience and the revisions I believe the composer will have rendered his works in those years between 2001 and 2009. I usually don’t take much notice of a composer’s detailed descriptions or explanations of their works, or at least try not to let them color my own impressions too much, and I don’t do it here either – but I regard Bassal's experience of the sounds as one possible experience out of innumerable variations. This goes for all art, or anything at all, really. Intro from Bassal’s homepage in the early 2000s: “While studying music in Montreal at Concordia University in the late 70s, Dominique Bassal discovered (with a little help from Kevin Austin) a personal resonance with the aesthetics and techniques of electroacoustic music. He was especially interested in the 'concert of loudspeakers' idea of sound diffusion, which frees a composer from non-musical, often histrionic, expectancies linked to a staged instrumental performance. His long Road to Damascus (lasting 20 years) through the universe of commercial music production provided a strong technical background while allowing him, since 1999, to devote himself almost exclusively to electroacoustic composition. An award winner in the 2002 electroacoustic competition JTTP (Jeu de Temps / Time Play), he then became a jury member for the same competition in 2003, 2004 and 2005. His document The Practice of Mastering in Electroacoustics has been published in the CEC electronic magazine, eContact! 6.3, as well as on the Mac Music Website.”
Bassal, from the earlier presentation: The introduction to this piece is a radio foreshadowing, and thus lamenting – the main theme. In between there is along spatial drift, made of concentric waves. This portion represents the icy traversal of a temporal vortex over millions of years. The emergence into an ideal future is destabilizing: this is a feverish, vaguely oriental delirium, at odds with the serene image one has of perfect utopia. Radical disorientation, possibly mocking and insulting, confirmed by an ending which unites biological jumble and mathematical cruelty: severed from his foundations, stripped of edifying content, the listener is abandoned, all his dreams ignored, on a rocky shore…” The music talk-winds its way in glowing evening clouds, under which sharp, piercing silver seeps in, severing your eardrums… as railway crossings fly by in red shift swings, the planet jagged with up-turned rails pointing into space in rising curves, as if the interior of this celestial body has exploded violently… A gliding mass of sound, thick as an Alaskan mudflow in the wake of a gigantic quake, piles up and collapses, again and again, as the planet remodels its appearance. The moment wears steel-beads that jingle as the world goes down into the star-crushing machine at the edge of the horizon of events, and everything you hear hereafter in the here-after is just recollections, remembrances – because the misunderstanding you called time has stopped… Bassal’s words about this piece, from the early century introduction: A long, sweeping sonicity embraces small, close-up involuntarities that screw by and shoot off like tumbling Van Allen paraphernalia into timelessness. I feel like something turned upside down and in and out and read from right to left in a bewildering hall-of-mirrors frame of mind. I’m riding the artist’s brush. I’m contaminated into his painting. I’m lost in an imagined world of oil, bound for crackles 400 planetary years from now.
Track 3. L’inénarrable Nout (2002, 2009) [18:53] Bassal, from his first presentation of 2002: Bassal enters my listening in embellished, dark nuances, softly but ominously bending my world into a state of curving time. Bassal’s piece dissolves into my senses like good medicine, a cure for spiritual indigestion, seeping into my veins and finally into the magnificent worlds of my cells, lighting them up from within in a purple hue that isn’t uncomfortable, changing me in some little but significant way. The dynamics of living at work! As the music moves on – not in a linear way, it seems – smaller sounds are allotted more attention, moving up trajectories of hidden dimensions in whispering glissandi, in the dancing movements of an artist’s brush in a Paris loft, tooth-ache whining and jingling along the beltway, traveling faster and faster around existence as such, which itself bores deeper, ever deeper into an inner world that proves emptier and emptier; life as a white hole!
Bassal from his words of 2001: When the falling is over, a revolving, slowly turning might render life inaccessible, hard to handle, albeit with the beauty of solid loss and true despair. The sense of motion is dizzying, but it is tough to understand whether it is you or the giant, purple sphere that is in motion. The grating of a train breaking to a halt at a station in your memory pierces your head – as Bassal slowly melts down into an early La Monte Young drone of simple, layered overtone beauty that washes your pride and fear away, leaving a pure light of appreciation and bold gratitude in your midst, where the swarms of pettiness used to reign. Free at last, God Almighty, I’m free at last! [M. L. K.] (Are birds free of the chains of the skyway?) [B. D] The shuffling soaring and wheezing of swarms of bees round up the stray s, and as the music comes to its conclusion, so do you, your thoughts all resting in one of the letters of the word GLIMPSING within brackets on page 92 of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. (ISBN 0-19-500223-7) |
