Dominique Bassal
Écraser L’Autre
CANADA empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24191 CD (2024)
Dominique Bassal (born Cairo, now living in Montreal) started out with an academic training, but cut his teeth in the commercial world as an engineer and studio genius working on various pop music productions, apparently applying avant-garde methods to these genres. He’s also something of a “house engineer” for this particular label, with multiple mastering credits to his name.
He has released his own compositions before, such as Ubiquité in 2009, but today declares he wishes to move beyond the “allegories” that used to characterise his early work. This new get-tough “tell it how it is” attitude is reflected in the title of this album and the six tracks which make direct reference to the rise of various historic dictators and or other instances of human rights abuses, taking in everything from the KKK to Rwanda, by way of the Deir Yassin massacre, Adolf Hitler, and even Joe McCarthy. “We have let a handful of hallucinated prophets convince us to turn the other cheek,” is his hard-hitting warning, “unsurprisingly, the psychopathic minority seized the opportunity to take control of the world.” Stirring words – and it doesn’t take much effort to read between the lines and apply this lesson to our contemporary global situation.
He’s also got some harsh words for the genre of modern electroacoustic music itself, which he regards as being driven by a “geek complex”, apologising for the generally poor music, and dismissing a large corpus of work as “infinite variations of the most insipid and predictable sonic material”. One problem might be that composers have simply forgotten how to communicate with an audience, deliberately draining their work of any emotional content or any element that might be mistaken for “story-telling”, in favour of the purity of abstraction. To hear Bassal’s attempt to redress this balance, tune into these six pieces, which contain plenty of exciting shifts in timbres, exotic spice and flavours, and near-cinematic grandeur in their narrative sweeps.
While I find myself caught up in the thrill of the moment more than once, I’m also feeling a slight sense of sprawl – no real beginning or end to these colourful lakes of sound. The emotional register throughout is somewhat gloomy and pessimistic, given the themes he has taken on, and while there’s much to admire in his feisty spirit, the actual music isn’t quite as incisive or forthright. (01/11/2024)