Francis Dhomont

Frankenstein Symphony
Asphodel/Sombient

French-born, Canadian composer Francis Dhomont has a long, impressive career and a lengthy discography, but this is his best known work in avant-music circles. It's a wonderful assemblage of other people's musique concrete and electro-acoustic pieces, rendered all the more bizarre by Dhomont's recontextualization and deft use of spatial effects. Some bits of it sound like a soundtrack to some un-named horror movie.

Here's some notes on it by the composer himself:

A hybrid thing in four movements, made of cut-up pieces, pasted, assembled, sowed parts that are alike and contrasted, and that I have named, for obvious reasons, the Frankenstein Symphony: an unusual electroacoustic adventure.

Armed with a scalpel and a splicing (operational) block, I sampled several morphological organs from the the works of 22 composers and friends (many of whom were students of mine), and with their imprudent blessings (on a stormy night?), brought to life this little acoustic monster which I hold particularly close to my heart. —Francis Dhomont

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