Une Séance Avec M. Bruno.
Here’s a real nice one by Bruno Duplant. Everyone knows that we can hear the voices of dead people on tapes, cylinders, and records, and Écouter les Fantômes (CRÓNICA 221-2024) is a fanciful take on this fascinating supernatural phenomenon, which has been popularised to an inch of its life with movies like White Noise and EVP.
Most of us had never heard of Friedrich Jürgenson until Mike Harding released that From The Studio For Audioscopic Research record in 2000, not unrelated to the Ghost Orchid item from the previous year. Jürgenson always seemed to me rather a boring fellow; in a staid, stodgy manner he laboured to convince the world of the scientific “truth” of what he thought he’d discovered. He wanted us to believe that unattended tape recordings could capture the presence of ghosts. Bruno Duplant, on today’s record, is doing quite the opposite; he’s writing a fiction in sound, and openly admits to it; he expresses “the aim of trying to transcribe a phantasmagorical, ancestral and secret universe which has always been fascinated and/or frightened us.” I think that’s what appeals to me too; the idea of secrets, the idea of finding ways to understand and explore the past, and the fact that we like to be frightened as well as fascinated by the unknown. It’s a very human compulsion.
Accordingly, distorted and treated voices drift in and out of the sonic “ectoplasm” he weaves on these two long compositions, and the effect is strangely beautiful and eerie; almost recognisable as human speech, or song, or something else that is totally unknown to us. There’s also the occasional bump and knock as these ghosts and spirits knock over another antique lamp or crash into your wooden oak furnishings. Duplant also did the sleeve photos which are brilliant re-stagings of 19th-century séance photographs, and such like; arms and faces of ethereal entities trying to break through from the “other side” and reach us with their phantom limbs.
Duplant has turned in some ultra-minimal offerings heard by us in previous years, but this one has more exciting content per square inch, and is more accessible than some of his delightful but impenetrable sonic riddles. Ed Pinsent