Annette Vande Gorne, Werner Lambersy

Impalpables brings together three works in which Annette Vande Gorne set texts by the Belgian poet Werner Lambersy, composed between 1986 and 1994 at her Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio in Ohain. This 2018 edition is a reissue of the disc, which was produced in close association with L’Année nouvelle, a festival and review of the French short story at the Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve; its organiser Vincent Engel introduces the booklet.

Noces noires (1986), dedicated to Lambersy and presented at the Centre Pompidou, speaks of the death of a woman, a mother, and is read by the poet himself. Vande Gorne restructured the text with silences and built a kaleidoscope of memory around it, keeping the music in a supporting role. Francis Dhomont wrote that the musician “stays behind the scenes”. Architecture nuit (1988), dedicated to Dhomont and read by Alain Carré, takes the opposite path: the text is one source among others, and the work is organised as variations on space and timbre. It was commissioned by the RTBF for the Grand Prix Paul Gilson and was a finalist at Bourges in 1990.

Le ginkgo (1994), in memory of the composer’s mother, follows a short story by Lambersy about a man’s inner voyage over a lifetime, read by Vincent Smetana in a voice that starts flat and grows more animated. Its material, mostly vocal, was processed on a SYTER at the GMEM in Marseille and organised along three axes: time, space and movement.

Born in Charleroi in 1946, Vande Gorne studied with Guy Reibel and Pierre Schaeffer in Paris and founded Musiques & Recherches and the festival L’Espace du son. Lambersy (Antwerp 1941, Paris 2021) published about 40 volumes of poetry, among them Maîtres et maisons de thé.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 1839, 2018.