Francis Dhomont: Frankenstein Symphony (Asphodel/Sombient)
Purchased from the dollar bin at The Exchange
Who's Francis Dhomont? Hell if I know. But then most people, including many locals, could say the same about me.
In years past I've been a hawk for the dollar bins a The Exchange, as well as other stores. There's barely a dollar bin any more. There are so many CDs that nobody seems to want, why bother giving up the space?
The pickings at times were so rich, I had to stop myself. But I also made some incredible finds, such as two $1 Fela Kuti discs. That's why you hunt.
How did I pick up on this? Maybe the title Frankenstein Symphony caught my eye. Sure, I'll look at that. It's a promo copy sold off (multiple times it appears) from KVNM, a station in Albuquerque. Funny how these things can travel. There's a promo sticker on the front, which reads in part: "...more like a mental soundtrack. You can, however, scare little children with this, say around Halloween. Also applies to other holidays that require a new perspective. ... This composition is derived from the works of 22 other composers. He's 74 years old and still ahead of his time."
I thought, maybe a Plunderphonics-style work? I'll buy that for a dollar!
It maybe indeed be at its heart a Plunderphonics-style work. The thing about John Oswald's work is that he's often making a comment on the original (well known) artist by reassembling components sampled from their work. An example I often played in my classes was "Net", a less than two minute assemblage of Metallica samples (mostly drawn from Master of Puppets). Oswald mostly edited together the short starts and stops of Metallica songs to create the ultimate Metallica work! I think it's funny as hell.
This work is assembled from bits and pieces of electroacoustic composers, none of which I know at all. Perhaps I've come across some of their names, but nothing sticks out. Gilles Gobeil, Ned Bouhalassa, Christian Calon, Annette Vande Gorne, Claude Schryer, is there a point in me going on?
"...A mental soundtrack" is as good a description of this work as any. It's without question more aligned with the French school of musique concrète than the German elektronische musik. Even if I'm uncertain whether some sound sources start acoustically or as synthesized sound, the work feels intuitive more than calculated. When coaching my former students on these styles, I would comment that musique concrète could have a narrative quality. That's not necessarily bad in itself, but that (at least in my opinion) it was uninteresting to try to tell a specific story. Let the sounds be sounds.
Which reminds me of a project a student submitted. He had collected samples from recordings of the first moon launch. In the middle of the work, he had the sound of dripping water as if it was in a cave. I asked him why he used it? "Because it sounded cool." I responded, "Last I checked, there was no water on the moon."
This CD's work is in four movements, similar to a Classical symphony: "Allegro", "Andante", "Scherzo (Giocoso)", "Finale". In some way I think that's a joke, but also it gives him a framework, a form. Each has its own air so to speak, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you which was "Andante" if I heard it out of context. The scherzo movement does rely on car and toy horns, and duck sounds, for some of its content, so that tracks. I might have guessed it to be the "Scherzo (Giocoso)" if I listened to it separately.
I'm working on an intuitive response to this, so forgive me with words fail me. It's not too far astray from Steven Stapleton/Nurse With Wound's work. Maybe a little more academic? But definitely not too much.
If there was nothing else to this album, there's an incredible amount of editing. It took effort.
Would it mean anything to me if I was familiar with the sampled artists' music? I think I might catch something, an element I'd heard before, but nothing sits on a single idea for very long. There are highs, lows, hills and valleys, familiar sounds and unfamiliar. I'm okay with letting it all play by me.
That said, the movements range from 14:30 and 16:41 each in length. Perfect length for a compact disc or a double LP. Does the medium influence results? In this case, I can't believe otherwise. If he was unfettered by the restrictions of the medium, would the work have been different? Considering all of the movements flow without a specific form that I can hear, I am uncertain each needed to be as long as it was. But I don't really know, do I? Maybe his decisions stand apart from the medium, maybe it's exactly as long as he intended it to be.
I see on Francis' discogs page that he died in 2023 at age 97. Like Tom Lehrer. There was an obit for Tom in the New York Times this week.
After my blog posts about Tom and Pink Floyd, maybe I thought it was time to go "impossibly obscure" again. Some or all of this is on Youtube if you care to look it up.
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