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Exil is a work of foundations, of homecomings. It brings to mind Thomas Bernhard’s insistent theme of origins, decline and regression (The Cellar: A Withdrawal, The Cause, etc.). Torn from the world of adults and returned to the archetypes of childhood, “exile” is meant here by Denis Dufour as a primitive echo chamber relaying the foundational waves of the world: the first breath of origins; the supernatural inertia of mountainous landscapes below the sunrise of an August morning; suffering confinement within the darkness of the industrial world; the eternal winter of the forge, of the steelworks. This fusing metal is the return, the decline, the remolding of a life prepared for by the poet or by someone who has fallen from grace (be it in their own eyes or in those of others). Doesn’t power isolate itself? And the money amassed, the social pyramid built up – don’t they produce monsters fated to become so many pariahs?
Exil is an island surrounded by water – the Elbe – Saint-Helen, a volcanic island. The return of the theme of fusion and of elemental remolding. It is the desert of initiation, the forest of origins where, in a second that lasts a hundred years, Arjuna learns from Krishna everything about the past, present and future – his own and those of everyone else – about the knowable and the unknowable, before diving back into time and clashing once more with Man in a war without end. This pacification – whether suffered or chosen – and this silence, this solitude, is also the lake where Excalibur sleeps, the rock where fossils are enclosed, waiting for the moment when love heats the earth once more to live anew.
Playing with a sort of sublimation of the sonic material, Denis Dufour captures the hums, the breaths, the cavalcade of elements and submerges them into his playpen. Appeals, complaints, animal shrieks, bells, herds of mysterious egregore, the Akashic memory of the noises of the world since the dawn of time; it all spins in a spiral of extinction. It is all melted down into primitive and chanted bubbling. That is, provided that acousmatic art is not, as Schaeffer reminds us, made with feeling, or with expressed or articulated emotions, but rather with matter, organisms, and unformulated needs that are only felt in the depths, relieved of the mask of any message.
Henceforth, various dungeons and refuges are opened to our sonic contemplation: pastures and tropical forests riddled with signs, inner city ghettos, deserts and abysses. The echoes of an industrial world that has exiled part of society to the depths of the earth. Miners and steelworkers that have extracted the dark side of the world – first coal, then diamond, ore, and the creative gold that poets extract from themselves over a whole lifetime without ever exhausting their resources. A lifetime which is itself nothing but a long, inner and secret exile up until the moment they realize that the greatest refuge of all is to protect oneself from nothing.
[Thomas Brando]

1953 – *

With his morphological and expressive approach to sound, Denis Dufour works on pieces in a state of constant renewal, on ideas that are specific to each piece. The resultant work is like a large fresco in which no themes sound alike, one goes through varied and breathtaking soundscapes, appreciating the sheer imagination though the consistency of his style. By deliberately but effortlessly having his music open to all sounds, Denis Dufour’s approach is that of liberty, independence and diligence. His craftsmanship, very French, is exquisite and mastered; every second of sound is enveloped by a supra-conscious ear, so that his work contains no trace of automatic tools.

Find his complete works at Maison ONA —nearly 200 instrumental, vocal, mixed music and electroacoustic works released successively.