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Here is a work which gladly gives itself to the genre of the “rite-of-passage tale” for children. Necessarily acousmatic, it is a dramatic and quirky tall tale with the terse and grave cruelty of fairy-tales. For children, Denis Dufour distills wonderment but not make-believe, discipline but not obedience, simplicity but not simplism, freedom but not anarchy; he calls more to the child-like rather than the childish. We may dare to speak to children, but it’s difficult to think about childhood without thinking about the movement that carries it, a movement of which it is both the perpetual and transitory expression.
Far from placing these small people into the simplistic and exploitable image of the miniature adult, but equally far from framing them within the idealistic and dreadful icon of destructive wishful thinking, Dufour sonically questions, raises questions, and explores, that is, provided that childhood should be above all else a moment of exploration (and not a moment of experimentation), in which children explore the world, learning to appropriate the means to get to know it, and that adults explore their world – that is, as ex-children ourselves, our own world.
Which art if not acousmatic art – remaining so close to fundamental games, to the essence of having fun – has rules you can invent as you go along, where the world comes into existence as we examine it, and with our whole ears? And how can we distinguish between looking at a child and looking back on our own childhood? How can we forget that it is pure potential before all else, an absolute metaphor for becoming?
Our guides will be a bee that has died from having loved too much, and a pearl born out of an excess of life. A toy shop bazaar where nothing is played under the table, where mechanics are gutted by the sadism of an ingenuous, tiny hand, and where there is the nagging pace of a transformation made of Copernican revolutions upon the backdrop of a continuum… All of this will be our stage decor, our rhythm. A learned fiction follows, the memory of no book, the path to no truth… Bon voyage.
[Jérôme Nylon]

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.