Francis Dhomont

Sous le Regard d’un Soleil Noir is a single acousmatic work in eight sections by Francis Dhomont, realized in 1979-80 at the Université de Montréal and completed at the Ina-GRM in 1981. First released by the Ina-GRM in 1982, it returns here in a new edition as the first part of Dhomont’s Cycle des profondeurs, a group of works inspired by psychoanalytic thought; the second part is Forêt profonde.

The piece draws on the psychiatrist Ronald D Laing and on French translations of The Politics of Experience, Knots and above all The Divided Self. Spoken passages, kept deliberately intelligible and read by Arthur Bergeron, Marthe Forget and Pierre Louet, act as clinical commentaries between the sections. The note B natural is the obsessed character of the work, a tonic axis binding the sections together, with memories of Wozzeck surfacing along the way. Section titles such as Engloutissement, Implosion and Pétrification follow Laing’s descriptions, and the last, Le message quand vient le soir, takes its title from Kafka.

The sixth section, Citadelle intérieure, was an Ina-GRM commission added in 1981. The work premiered in Montréal on 3 February 1981 and won 1st prize in the electroacoustic program music category at the 9th Bourges competition that year. In his booklet essay, Jean-Jacques Nattiez writes that it makes the listener share the anguish and solitude of the schizophrenic.

Born in Paris in 1926, Dhomont studied with Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger, and in the late 1940s experimented on his own with magnetic wire recording. Since 1963 he has worked only with fixed media. He taught at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996 and is a five-time winner at Bourges.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9633, 1996.