AMN Reviews: Acousmatic Music as a Bridge to the Mundus Imaginalis – Denis Dufour: Complete Acousmatic Works, Vol. 1 (Kairos, 2021) Part Two

It doesn’t take more than a quick look around bandcamp to realize that this “big idea”… that music (or electronically transformed music specifically) as a facilitating mystical device for accessing “other places” isn’t exactly a “big idea”. Anything but, in fact. It’s been around forever… just, at random pick an independent music creator’s page and read some of the commentary on their recordings. Words like “occult”, “transformative”, “transcendent”, “otherworldliness”, “supernatural”, “magick” (with and without a “k”) etc. etc. etc. abound. I’m not questioning the sincerity or authenticity of these thoughts, claims and descriptions but just sayin… the esotericism is everywhere these days, hiding in plain sight. I think it’s safe to say that it’s heavily ingrained in our culture and it’s allure is undeniable.

What I hope to put across with this series of write-ups (besides me jumping on that bandwagon) is more specific. Lets awkwardly call it “the Acousmatic sound artist as causal agent, magician and alchemist and why“. In part one, I found the words and observations of Henry Corbin’s “Eighth Climate” inspiring enough to trigger a quest for an Umberto Eco-like (see Foucault’s Pendulum) demonstration of these correspondences.

This is where Denis Dufour comes into the picture. Dufour has been flying under the radar of the Acousmatic music scene for too long. He is rarely mentioned when people name drop the Schaeffer-ian generation of French Acousmatic artists, (like Bayle, Parmegiani, Henry, Ferrari, Reibel and others) but should be included in that group, having studied under Schaeffer in 1974. His big Kairos box is, and deservedly so, considered a massive tour de force… and it’s from here that I’m going to select a few pieces that I think connect well with the general theme of this write-up. Namely, the accessing and explorations of the world of the imaginal via sound.

Lets begin at the very end, CD 16 entitled Moments musicaux, Vol. 1. Even though each piece (there are eight) has a stated intention by the composer… as an alternative, let me suggest to the listener to just… follow your own path. You will find that path to be quite the Lewis Carroll experience. The disc is long, almost 80 minutes and in this case, that’s 80 minutes of head nourishment that takes the active imagination on a trip unforgettable! Trust me when I say, there is not an ounce of filler here… it’s a long, strange pilgrimage.

Like many of the Masters, Dufour has the knack for combining the “electro” with the “acoustic” in ways that create signatures that can only be attributed to him. Just like hearing a “Parm sound”, or a “Bayle thing”, or a “Dhomont moment”… Dufour has his “isms” as well. Throughout all his music, there is a ubiquitous eiderdown of alieness that permeates every corner of the listeners perspective. He constructs mini-narratives lasting a few minutes within a much longer plot line that he uses to lure, or beckon the traveller into AND allows them to become comfortable within this shroud… till it’s no longer “alien” but, somehow familiar in its strangeness. Eventually, they are politely ushered out the back gilded door into the next set piece of would be symbols.

This is a constant M.O. on this disc (and across the whole box for that matter). Regardless of the composer’s intent of these pieces, Dufour makes it easy for the psychonaut to forage his own way through this Eight Climate on their own terms. Who knows what they’ll find… one thing’s for sure, it will be memorable!

But let’s stay on point and consider Dufour’s intentions here. There is a suite of pieces on this disc called Le Livre des désordres (The Book of Disorders) based on mood cycles inspired by individuals with bipolar disorder. I personally didn’t listen to it with this in mind until I read the notes in the box, but it’s certainly possible to use instruments, textures, and transformed sounds to symbolize the depths of emotional states of mind.

Acousmatic music is sound-based music in which the source is hidden from the listener. This may be a suitable approach for expressing and communicating the inner worlds personal emotional experiences. The listener doesn’t see the sources of the sounds that may mirror masked emotions and memories, instead… this abstracting out of gestural motions helps to eliminate visual distractions. Sound, and sound alone can evoke impressionistic and symbolic experiences, taking listeners on a journey through these inner worlds and allowing them to explore otherwise invisible emotional and psychological depths, perhaps on a deeper level.

All of the above is complete conjecture on my part and I in no way speak from experience. I’m just trying to draw lines between Dufour’s compositions and how they can relate to the unseen aspects of certain individuals and… by extension, perhaps all of us.

Pivoting back to CD 3 entitled Melodramas, Vol. 3, there are two major pieces worth mentioning here. The 30 minute BlindPoint, Op. 183 is a lay up in illustrating the dichotomy between humanities inundation of visual stimulations in today’s world vs. the pure symbology of the ur-image you find in the Eighth Climate. Quoting from the notes in the box:

Rattled by sensations as visual and tactile as sonic prompts, plunged into a sort of pan-optical blind test, the audience is invited to explore the blind spots in our ‘society of the spectacle’, greedy for distractions and eager to over-eat any and all hypnotic images and reconstituted footage that take away one’s ability to foster any form of interior reclusion, or free oneself to go a little off the beaten track.

Thomas Brando

and further:

In these stormy times of information and misinformation, the concept of a blind spot takes on new, particular importance. It has become common now to confuse information with knowledge. But in the absence of common knowledge, infobesity hovers over us. It buries us under a mountain of inhibitions and confusions out of which our reflexes, as opposed to our reflections, have become the first port of call for many of us.

Thomas Brando

These two quotes fit Corbin’s words like a glove. In today’s Western culture, the human animal lives, breathes and gorges themselves on sensory overload, especially of the visual kind. To Corbin, this is a complete dilution of image where things become meaningless and totally inconsequential.

The piece is a mixed work adding (the involuntary participation of) flute, oboe, double bass and viola along with recordings of the human voice. The latter is frequently transformed electronically by Dufour. I would consider much of Dufour’s work on this box to be quiet but highly detailed and this is no exception. Ironically though, listening to the music… I wouldn’t have equated Dufour’s intention from the quotes above, that is… of the experience of an onslaught of degraded images the notes refer to. It was the occasional warped and stretched voice uttering “INFORMATION OOOOOOVERRRRLOOOOOOADD” that gave it away. Still, the masterful job of spatializing the various sounds within the headspace was my golden headphone ticket to the elusive elsewhere.

On the same CD, the 18 minute Tapovan is another slam dunk comparison to Corbin’s thoughts. The word can be roughly translated from the Sanskrit as “Forest of Austerity”. Dufour is equating this as something akin to pious spiritual practice. Again, from the liner notes:

In India, a place – or a person who embarks traditionally on a spiritual retreat – can be referred to as a Tapovan, even if there is no forest. The same goes for whole areas where caves and hermitages are found in which wise men and Sadhus had lived.

Admittedly, I haven’t actually looked into the methods and practice of reaching the Eighth Climate but my interest has been piqued after reading the Corbin paper. I wouldn’t have been devoting time to writing this if it wasn’t. I am quite sure though, that in order to reach the high level of interior reflection that is needed would not be achievable without an aspect of intense, devout spiritual devotion of sorts along with, or in addition to (in our modern time) some knowledge or study of Jungian psychology. Perhaps even a trained guide.

For my personal experience in listening to Tapovan, It was no stretch for me to conceive of such a place as either a journey’s end after an arduous trek of getting there, or… a beginning, a crossing over the aforementioned mountain of Qaf into the interiority of the self. Inspired by Corbin, a beautiful image presents itself of… in the blink of an eye and being unnoticeable… leaving all earthly map coordinates behind and suddenly finding oneself in “a place outside of a place“.

It’s another very quiet piece with lots of perceived acoustic sounds. Again, the detail here is in abundance. I hear a lot of what might be ceramic bowls being moved around augmented by quiet sound manipulations. Headphones and silent surroundings are you best friend on this one. (I can say that for many pieces on this box.) I get notions of the tired wayfarer, the devotee steeped in hyper-deep meditation bravely reaching inward towards a dimensionless no-place searching for the true self. For me, the appreciation comes from concentration because what Dufour does, as all good Acousmatic magicians do is create an opportunity for an external reality, thus allowing for the phenomenological experience.

In Part three, I’ll continue with looking at a couple more pieces from the box and, end with some closing thoughts. Thanks for reading and stay tuned.

Part One

Part Three

Mike Eisenberg (meisenberg1@hotmail.com)