Listening Blog #3

This week’s study was of Dhomont’s Forêt profonde and a reading from Francisco Lopez “Blind Listening”.

The CD for Foret profonde that I listened to was split into 13 different tracks. Unlike some of the previous pieces, this one had a much more abstract or elusive context. For example, the previous listening, El Tren Fantasma, was sounds recorded from a train, and the piece was very clear about its own conception. This is also explicitly true for I am sitting in a room. Foret profonde, however, does not have such a clear connection to “real world sounds” or settings, and has a similar abstraction that a piece of instrumental music may have, for example.

This is not to say that all the sounds are not recognizable to their sources: soundscapes of wilderness, frogs, crickets, cars, and even familiar instruments like pianos can be heard throughout. An especially notable recurring sound that Dhomont uses is human speech. Several tracks on the album feature some kind of recording of spoken word, usually in French- ranging from being referenced to being overwhelmingly prominent. However, I would argue that the voices still are not really meant to be listened to and comprehended in the sense that they need to be understood, but are rather just meant to be heard in a sonic sense. Dhomont emphasizes the unique timbre that speech has, and how enthralling the voice can be. The second track on the CD, “Á l’orée du conte”, is an great example of this element. The first voice that is introduced is deconstructed with some kind of gate effect: almost as if it has been physically compressed. The result, to say the least, is disturbing. I do not speak French, but I believe it would be nearly incomprehensible even if I did (assuming the voice was in French, that is). Here, Dhomont is taking away emphasis on the actual meanings of the words but rather the sounds the words produce. Later in the piece, more clearly spoken voices start stacking onto each other from different locations in the sonic space. For me, this made the space very anxious and almost overwhelming. Again, I do not speak French so it is hard for me to make a fair assessment, but I believe that the voices are too chaotic to be possibly all understood, or at least, not at once. In this way, I think Dhomont is challenging our tendency to listen to the words spoken by the voice, but to listen to the unique timbre it contains, which may often be overlooked. I think, in this way, it may not be so different from what Lucier was trying to achieve with I am sitting in a room, where the words of his voice were deconstructed to the raw, unique timbres that they produce. Lucier would be an extreme example, however.

I find this to connect very appropriately to the reading from Lopez. Lopez makes a case for what he calls “blind listenings”, which is essentially the practice of listening to sounds totally divorced from their “real-world” contexts that we may naturally associate them to. This spoke well with me: I think people have a tendency to dismiss field recordings as just empirical documentation rather than a tool to present untold stories and feelings. In relation to Foret profonde, Dhomont is altering and combining sonic settings in ways that are unrecognizable. Even the artwork featured on the CD is a confusing collage of a city skyline and a sketch of a jungle. This approach forces the listener to engage with the music formally. Indeed, Francisco Lopez comes across to me as a formalist: he believes that good art can exist and only should exist outside of the context of it’s setting and/or author, and bears a universal quality that is present on its own.