An acknowledged master — every piece here was commissioned and / or received an international award — Dhomont’s bright new empreintes DIGITALes release groups “five fantasies to be listened to with eyes closed.” It’s a mesmerizing ride. The manically voluble Here and There explores spatialization with predominantly synthesized material. Je te salue, vieil océan! folds in excerpts from Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror read by Marc-Henri Boisse (in French). The few real-world sounds are immediately transformed: Chroniques de la lumière’s central movement, Artifices, concerns itself with man-made light sources, quickly dissolving a struck match’s snap and fireworks’ eruption. Transformed chorus and crowds rush through Corps et âme. Dhomont routinely applies an army of studio techniques, filtering, speed changes, but foremost, he delivers rich color and impenetrable variety. Its notes referencing departure, fleeing, exile, life and death, the most recent item, Voyage-miroir, haunts imposingly. These decidedly oneiric pieces shine. Not for the faint of heart.

Aimé Dontigny is a Québec artist with a slippery aesthetic that wriggles free of easy classifications. Having begun with the “free noise” collective Napalm Jazz, his treatment of sound at its root informs his later work, from electroacoustic duos with Diane Labrosse and Chantal Dumas to a recent live performance under the direction of Francisco López at this year’s Victoriaville festival. Dontigny accesses these muscles here but also draws upon his work with Érick d’Orion in morceaux_de_machines, a project that force-feeds noise into the drum & bass paradigm. What Geisteswissenschaften offers is the rapid surveying of a micro-managed patchwork landscape where many styles and ideas compete for space. It opens with the lazy hip-hop pulse of Koons, which is eventually overturned by a chaotic collapse of competing beats, followed by the smooth flow of Pruitt-Igoe, where the electric piano and syrupy strings are just a little too uncomfortably degraded to produce nostalgia. The album begins to describe the worm in the heart of cultural recycling. What many modern electronic albums undertake to preserve through mutation and adaptation, Dontigny slathers with new layers of decay and distance-confusing disorder. The album succeeds by allowing just enough of the “known” to peek through while spinning through its disorienting cycles of hyper-detailed noise.

Aimé Dontigny hat sich weit über die Montréaler Szene hinaus einen Namen gemacht als Hälfte von morceaux_de_machines und in Partnerschaften mit Paul Dolden oder Diane Labrosse. Sein Solodebut fällt unter die Kategorie Plunderphonie und das nicht nur im musikalischen Sinn. Er zitiert Debords Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels und durchmischt kunstweltliche (‚Koons‘, ‚… informel‘, ‚Color Field‘, ‚All-Over‘, ‚Gutai‘, ‚Turner‘) mit philosophischen Anspielungen. ‚Begriffsschrift‘ stammt von Gottlob Frege, auf dessen Logizismus auch ‚Mathesis‘ hinweist. ‚Pruitt-Igoe‘, Minoru Yamasakis Betonburgen in St. Louis, deren Sprengung am 16.3.1972 (zufällig einem Jahrestag der Demolierung von Würzburg 1945) stehen ikonografisch für den ‚Todestag der Moderne‘. ‚Tatline‘ und sein Turm gehören zum ähnlich obsoleten Projektemachen. ‚Aufbau‘ schillert zwischen der Umkehrung von Heideggers ‚Abbau‘, der mit ‚Holzwege‘ auch noch explizit auftaucht, und Der logische Aufbau der Welt von Rudolf Carnap, auf den sich auch ‚Recollection of Similarity‘ bezieht. So ergibt sich ‚Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft‘ (Nietzsche) eines Auf & Ab, sprich De-Konstruktion. Dazu mixt Dontigny Cut-ups aus allen möglichen Stilen, die er zerhäckselt und zerschreddert, mit dem Ziel to make the familiar strange. Statt auf vermeintliche Originalität zu pochen, setzt Dontigny Jonathan Lethems meta-plagiatorischen Essay The Ecstasy of Influence in die Praxis um. Lethem stülpt Harold Blooms Anxiety of Influence um und plädiert in einem Text, der ausschließlich aus Zitaten besteht (!), für öffentliches Eigentum, die Schönheit des Wiederverwendens und eine „Ökonomie des Schenkens“. Originalität verhält sich zu Sampling, Collage, Variation, Remix, Parodie etc. wie Einbildung zu ‚Wirkungsgeschichtsbewusstsein‘. An Stelle der Angst, im Schatten zu stehen, bestohlen zu werden oder sich zu verunreinigen, tritt die „Ekstase der Kontamination“, der Vergiftung, Kreuzung, Verschmelzung. Dontigny schwelgt in einer Portmanteau-Klangwelt, in ‚Koffermusik‘ aus gekreuzten und überblendeten, gestauchten und beschleunigten Fetzen von Noise, Jazz, HipHop, Der Pate III, Satie, Living Strings etc. Wer sich dabei die Quersumme aus John Oswald, Carl Stone, Christian Marclay, Rick Rue, Stock Hausen & Walkman oder den Otomo Yoshihide von Sampling Virus vorstellt, ist auf der richtigen Spur. Jon Vaughns ‚Rondo Mix‘, der diese Ästhetik überdreht, zeigt die ihr immanente Crux — Übereifer, Datenstau.

For quite some time now, there has been no shortage of art that has made comment on the increasing speed with which we are collectively bombarded with communication. Really, the issue has been approached from every conceivable angle — from Alvin Toeffler’s predictive Future Shock, to John Cage [and Lejaren Hiller]’s absurdist HPSCHD, to Negativland’s panicked track Quiet Please on Escape from Noise, to Satanicpornocultshop’s revelatory album Anorexia Gas Balloon; which embraced detritus as an aesthetic.

It would also be easy to make the case that nearly the entire noise genre is a composite of reaction to (and acceptance of) this bombardment, at times rendering even Toeffler’s worst scenarios relatively tame.

Unless you’re living under a rock, this isn’t really fresh material. But of course, artists are products of their environment — so the question becomes, “how do I make this new?” A_dontigny, half of morceaux_de_machines and a full fan of the underscore, seems to have found himself in such a position with his first solo album for the No Type label, Geisteswissenschaften. For those who aren’t aware, this mouthful of text is more or less the German translation of “Humanities,” as in the study of, etc…

Much like such studied pursuits, attempting to nail down Geisteswissenschaften is equally futile. A_dontigny flirts at the edge of enough nearly-familiar material and structure to confound any sort of pigeon-holing, meaningful categorization, or understanding. It’s as if he is standing in a secret area of a Venn diagram, particularly in the impressively-crafted tracks featuring composer Paul Dolden. This is intricate music, filled with conflicting patterns which alternate from being ridiculously wrong to being surprisingly right.

I don’t know if it was A_dontigny’s intent to create a document so laced with examples of our futile struggle for understanding in a world fraught with miscommunication, sheer multitudes of perception, and the odd monkeywrench; but nevertheless, that’s what I’m taking away from it. On a more positive note however, I am still heartened to find that where A_dontigny may see the impossibility of ultimate understanding, he is drawn to create regardless.

In the end, this urge may be where the real redemption of Geisteswissenschaften comes about — acknowledging that no answer may appear, but that the question is worth asking.

Le tout récent disque de Barry Truax paru sous étiquette Cambridge Street Records, Spirit Journies, propose un voyage symbolique et onirique qui enveloppe l’auditeur de ses sonorités riches et diverses provenant ici des sirènes des trains canadiens conçues par Robert Swanson, là de voix captées dans la cathédrale de San Bartolomeo à Busetto (Italie); ailleurs, des chants de gorges inuits ou, encore, du shakuhachi japonais.

Sonopsys: Luc Ferrari de la photographe Florence Gonot et du compositeur et artiste visuel Alexandre Yterce est une publication grand format en français et en anglais, disponible en 500 exemplaires. L’édition «de tête» de 15 exemplaires est signée et comprend en plus un photomontage original, sous étui.