Illusion by Annette Vande Gorne (review)

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On, better known as The Slave Ship (1840), is among Joseph M. W. Turner's finest paintings, and one of the most recognizable visual artworks of the romantic movement. Fused with the painting L'étoile noire (1957), by the founder of les automatistes Paul- émile Borduas, it greets listeners of Annette Vande Gorne's latest acousmatic venture, Illusion, in the form of Luc Beauchemin's cover art, Seule issue (2020). The level of intertextuality is broad. Beauchemin's title hints at necessity. The cover art's contrasting frames of references, too, provide an air of calamity. It is difficult—one may say impossible—to free one image from the other, or to brush aside the many implications of these whispers, these overtones in the context of here and now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the ethical, as well as economic, state of the world today. In spite of a seemingly absent narrative, these specters endure, however, throughout Illusion, at times by virtue of the omnipotence of sounds, and at others, through the performer's material and gestural presence.

"Déluges et autres péripéties" (2014–2015), the most recent endeavor on this album, operates from a singular, base leitmotif: "We await destruction." Replacing the ambiguity of the image with the certainty of the word, Vande Gorne chooses to walk in the glinting footsteps of poet Werner Lambersy, whose voice is one of the three used in the piece. Least subject to the manipulations pertinent to musique concrète, Lambersy's voice is used mainly to wend an otherwise umbrous or disquieting narrative. It is spoken using a narrator's voice, akin to Jean Négroni's role in Apocalypse de Jean by Pierre Henry. The piece is, in form, an art song. With a length of half an hour, its effectiveness depends on the listener's willingness to follow along. For it is punishing throughout, singular in this respect in Vande Gorne's repertoire, at times more threatening in character than the album Impalpables while matching, if not exceeding, the fervor of the opera Yawar Fiesta.

Vande Gorne's implacable art song is a far cry from Turner's gracious, albeit troubling, landscape. Where Turner transfigures, Vande Gorne echoes the dread, supporting a horrific poem, in her own words, "with horrific sounds." Not only is the piece texturally and emotionally unrelenting, the implementation of the voice in reverse can only be described as miasmic, rendering it vicious in ways contradicting contemporary acousmatic aesthetics. In this respect, the vicious narrative has few parallels in the greater electroacoustic repertoire, among them, Michel Chion's "Sanctus," from his early work, and the mass Requiem (1973), an equally demented endeavor "rich in extended vocal experiments and, most of all, spoken words."

Yet, does this bring the piece closer to Borduas and les automatistes? The art song is dedicated to Francis Dhomont, whose rapport with spoken words is exemplary within the broader acousmatic tradition. As per the majority of acousmatic works, it makes use of the fixed medium, and is designed for a 16-channel setup. This places it well away from the inclinations of les automatistes. Declarations such as "It seemed as if our future were set in stone," from the scandalous 1948 manifesto, Refus Global, for which Borduas and les automatistes are most remembered, here are not points of departure for unrest but very much Vande Gorne's aspirations. For her as a composer, fixity remains both an aesthetic and an ontological necessity. Hers is, in other words, neither a romantic, but, even more prominently, nor a revolutionary concern. In her own words: "I do not have a romantic vision of art" (CMJ 36(1):10–22). The automatic and the improvisatory are, in her view, contrasted with architecture and organization—with mastery over one's time...