Dominique Bassal

Écraser l'Autre collects six works that Dominique Bassal composed between 2018 and 2021 in his Montréal studio, all conceived for 7.1 channels and presented here in stereo. Leaving behind the allegories of his earlier releases, Bassal names his subject directly: each piece is attached to an episode in which one group set out to crush another.

The titles point to the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day (Saint-Barthélémy, le party), to pogroms from torch-lit nights to Rwanda (Pogroms énergisants), to the arming of Nazis (Bon matin, Adolf), to the 1948 killings at Deir Yassin (Deir Yassin mon amour), to a senator's persecutions handled in a burlesque register (Sénateur Joe Pet-pet) and to a philanthropist entrepreneur (L'informaticien à la seringue). The short booklet notes for each track are sarcastic and openly polemical, in the composer's own voice.

The main booklet text is a manifesto against the conventions of acousmatic music, which Bassal accuses of rejecting emotional content, narrative and any predictability. His answer is to learn from those who make music for a wide audience: the tools, tutorials and analytical work of pop production on dynamics, collisions between sounds and clarity of layers, adapted to invented or diverted sounds for which they were never designed. He admits that compromises on abstraction follow, and that he is not there yet.

Born in Cairo in 1955, Bassal worked for years as arranger, producer and studio manager in commercial music before returning to electroacoustics in 2001. He has been the mastering engineer of empreintes DIGITALes since 2004, wrote The Practice of Mastering in Electroacoustics (2002) and won the Jeu de temps / Times Play competition in 2002.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24191, 2024.