Iancu Dumitrescu
Pierres Sacrées / Hazard and Tectonics
AUSTRIA IDEOLOGIC ORGAN SOMA003 LP (2013)
During his compulsory stint in the Romanian military, the young Iancu Dumitrescu found himself alone on sentry duty one obsidian night, in some remote, mountain location. Unable to remain awake by tapping away curiously at nearby objects (among which a large sheet of glass hanging by wires), he soon fell asleep and was swiftly awoken by a terrible blast, which shook him ‘as if a thousand glass plates were falling and bursting at once’. The explosion did not emanate from the locality, but rather his dreaming mind. As he related in a 1997 interview with Tim Hodgkinson: ‘I wasn’t observing the plates falling from outside; I was inside them falling and exploding, I was inside the sound. This dream perhaps lasted two or three seconds, but the explosion lasted an eternity, a lifetime, like a 20-minute piece of music. I was in the centre of this explosion with a vast detail of sound but also vast force…’ It was an early instance of the creative benefit of solitude that the composer deems necessary to the composer or musician who would ‘strive against (the) dead perfection’ of established musical forms; of his unconscious providing him with the cataclysmic sounds he has often sought to reproduce with the help of hand-picked/trained musicians (including those of his Hyperion Ensemble) and furthermore, a phenomenological experience of sound, which has become an intrinsic aspect of the composer’s MO. While we may never personally benefit (or suffer) from a direct hit from one of his potent dream blasts, we can at least be grateful that so much of Dumitrescu’s music remains accessible, the present double thwack courtesy of the increasingly vital Ideologic Organ label.
Ostensibly a reissue of ‘Pierres Sacrées’ (originally issued on the composer’s Edition Modern label in 1991), his superlative composition for ‘prepared piano, metallic plates and objects’ (not to mention a bewilderingly sophisticated microphone setup), this is in fact more of a re-pairing with a formidable new piece: ‘Hazard and Tectonics’ (2009-2013), which was commissioned by Glasgow Tectonics Festival and released by EM in 2013. The potency of ‘Pierres Sacrées’ remains as unequivocally powerful as ever, even after doing time in out-of-print exile. Its originating conditions were serendipitous to be sure: a ‘brief and intense period of experimentation’ and the (debatable) misfortune to lack the kind of recording budget available to more affluent European organisations such as the GRM. Dumitrescu saw poverty as an asset: a bulwark against the distraction of technology, yet though sublimely inspired, he appeared to regard the piece quite soberly as ‘artisanal’ in production, while simultaneously acknowledging its pivotal role in the history of modern composition. Its alien aspect he remains unable to attribute to any part of himself, while the ‘distortion’ of its feral rips and tears – resounding like blazing meteorites pounding ferociously across the piano’s living innards with equal measures of violence and silence – he attributes to ‘(an) attempt to release or unveil the god that is living in every piece of base matter’. In response, writers have contrived correspondingly cosmogonical conceits to convey the piece’s primal grandeur (I’ll simply defer to the splendid sleeve image), while perhaps overlooking the very reductive processes at the heart of such primal work. Indeed, it is (by definition) impossible to locate the specifics of Dumitrescu’s phenomenology as he meditates on a chosen sound, peeling away all that ‘masks’ its bare essence, then re-veiling it in new acousmatic forms [1. The adjective originates from the practice of Pythagoras to deliver teachings from behind a veil while students sat silently.]. Thanks to the exemplary mastering job the piece still packs a wallop and that will suffice!
The juxtaposition of pieces old and new provides stimulating comparison, ‘Hazard and Tectonics’ being some 20 years the junior, scion of a more formidable recording budget and at least two decades worth of technological development. Though it doesn’t appear to diverge vastly from ‘Pierres Sacrées’ in terms of nuclear dynamics (perhaps a few shades more vibrational detail), it carries a good deal more clarity and clout: I hear an anti-matter Aphex Twin trying to bore through a dense wall of mattress springs with an electric drill decorated in whirling metal extravagances. In the silences there is a palpable coalescence of pure potential energy. The newcomer thus constitutes a worthy companion to the piece that grants it a historical context. Moreover, its humble designation as ‘computer assisted music’ should serve as a reminder not to ruminate too unnecessarily on the mechanics of the piece, but rather to experience it in as pure and undistracting a listening environment (and state) as possible.