Music, Sound and Time in Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan

Early on in the new film by former philosophy teacher, Bruno Dumont, Alexandra Lematre's character (identified only as "elle") takes an in-ear headphone from the pocket of her hoodie and slips it in her ear. We, the audience are never made privvy to the music she listens to, but the gesture draws attention to the absence of music in the film. As traditionally defined, there is no music in Hors Satan - no silken Hollywood strings, no pop songs, no diegetic performance, no non-diegetic score. Even the kind of sonic re-structuring usually handled by a sound editor is missing, for Dumont did not hire one.

No music, nor very much dialogue either - and most of that which there is is largely inconsequential. But Hors Satan is not a silent film. Far from it. We hear birds tweeting, cocks crowing, leaves rustling, as well as several more revealing sounds - a camera dolly rolling over its track, the wind blowing against a microphone.

In an interview with Jean-Michel Frodon, the director explains, "We recorded only live and "mono" sounds. What you hear in the film are the actual sounds recorded during shooting. I didn't alter or re-record them. I wish some noises weren't there, but I kept them anyway, stoically. . . The sound material is very rich and untamed. Therefore, when there is a moment of silence, you can feel it loud and clear."

At one moment, after it has been raining, we hear water running over a corrugated iron roof and falling to the ground. The two main characters pause in their journey to watch and listen, and we listen with them. These characters frequently take time out to simply stand still and pay attention to some ambient sound. And even in their absence, the camera will likewise pursue such sounds to their sources, becoming, in the process, a character like them. Sound - and a certain quasi-musical attentiveness to sound - thus subjectivizes, and in so doing constructs an audience that will be willing, like the film's characters to offer a certain attentiveness toward sounds, to give them time, without preconceptions.

How can we describe the sense of time experienced in the films of Bruno Dumont? It is certainly very far from the clock-time of Hitchcock, the almost Taylorist efficiency with which narrative details are revealed and slotted into the perpetual motion machine of the diegesis in North by North West or The Man Who Knew Too Much, for example. We find with Dumont a concern with rhythm and tempo that goes beyond brute functionalism, and there is evidently something musical in this. But neither are we dealing with the languorous time of Apichatpong Weerasthakul, nor the deep time of Bela Tarr, which would be something like the Erfahrung of Walter Benjamin.

Karlheinz Stockhausen once remarked that "Wagner, more than any other western composer, expanded the timing of western music: he would have been the best gagaku composer." While the first half of this statement is undoubtedly true, I'm not so sure about the second half. Think of the constantly held back, teetering sense of anticipation, of desperate yearning for an impossible fulfillment, found in Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect this is something foreign to the Japanese gagaku tradition. But maybe not so much to the cinema of Bruno Dumont - even if only to an earlier film such as Twenty-Nine Palms, in which the palpable sense of dread, of waiting for some seemingly inevitable horror hangs suspended in each crawling take, like the infinitely delayed resolution of some dissonance in the middle voices.

Hors Satan is different in this respect. The shot lengths are generally shorter than in his earlier films (though still considerably longer than most mainstream films), the forward motion of the narrative less precipitous. Perhaps this film is closer to the sense of time alluded to in Stockhausen's reference to gagaku.

In his book, Haunted Weather, David Toop, in the midst of a discussion about contemporary Japanese electronica, describes this 7th and 8th century court music which, he says, survives largely unchanged to this day, "So measured in the progress of its percussive markers that it draws the image of a footstep raised to move forward yet caught in a universal power cut, gagaku's timbral consistency is a gaseous astringency of reeds, flutes and free reeds."

Toop quotes William P. Malm's book on Japanese Music and Musical Instruments, which claims that the chords of the sho bamboo reed pipe do not serve the functions of tension and release allotted to western functional harmony, "Rather, they 'freeze' the melody. They are like a vein of amber in which a butterfly has been prepared. We see the beauty of the creature within but at the same time are unaware of a transparent solid between us and the object, a solid of such a texture that it shows that object off in a very special way."

Stockhausen discovered gagaku music when he travelled to Japan in 1966 to complete his Telemusik at the NHK electronic music studios, where composers like Toshiro Mayuzumi and Makoto Maroi had been creating electronic music for over a decade. Mayuzumi would score over a hundred films, including several by Imamura and Mizoguchi, both of whom are renowned for their long takes and slow, refined pacing.

Despite the sometimes austere titles, Mayuzumi's electronic music, such as 1953's X,Y,Z for musique concrète, (contemporary with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's concrète opera, Orphée 53), exhibits a kind of delirious playfulness, equal parts hallucinogenic Looney Tunes pandemonium and delirious melodrama, as pitch-shifted horns and bird tweets give way to echoplexed weeping.

Moroi and Mayuzumi's collaborative work, Variations on 7, is, however, more restrained, with a much greater economy of means, while still remaining very different from either the French concrète of Schaeffer and Henry or the sine tone based electronic music of Stockhausen and Eimert in Cologne. "One probably reason why this work seems to compelling and relevant now," says David Toop, "is the directness, the clarity, the sense of pure intent."

And this last seems to me a good description of the attraction of Dumont's film-making. He is one of the few directors working today willing to impose restrictions upon himself, to act with a strict economy of tools and means. Utilising a restricted repertoire of shot lengths, camera heights, and angles. Even if his short lengths were to be reduced much further, there would still be a certain sense of slowness to his film because there is none of the usual digital busyness of superimposed sonic and visual detail (/clutter). He does this without nostalgia: there is nothing old-fashioned looking - or sounding - about his films. But there is this sense of "propriety" as he says of Alexendra Lematre's performance. And the drama comes from the disproportion between this propriety, this certain holding back, a resistance to express even, and the sometimes quite startling events which unfold; events which in another context, filmed in another way, might seem, as Dumont says in the above cited interview, quite normal. This is the source of Dumont's "slap in the face"; a slap which is in many ways very musical. Like a snare drum erupting in the midst of a performance of John Cage's 4'33''.

Stephen Cornford, Elevator Gallery, London

It is perhaps fitting that sound artist and serial London Olympics site trespasser, Stephen Cornford, should have his first solo exhibition in a gallery on the edge of the Lea Valley, where the Olympiad's troupe of ill-conceived stadia will soon be dancing on the grave of the local community. It is here, in the interstices of Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets, that Cornford has staked out his psychogeographical stomping ground by pronouncing himself 'artist in residence' of the Olympics site and repeatedly breaking and entering into the place in the name of art. "You could place trespassing in the context of walking as art practice," says Cornford, "Probably begun by Dada’s 'construction of an aesthetic action to be effected in the reality of everyday life' and continued more famously by the Surrealist deambulation and the Situationist dérive, with that thread continuing through the rather more populist practices of ‘land artists’ such as Richard Long. The act of trespassing is not only a walk however, it’s the deliberate performance of an antisocial act, it’s intentionally trangressive. Although there is an important element of exploration once inside ‘the zone’ the performative disregard for the barrier is central to this notion of practice." But being artist in residence has not always been restricted to mere trespass, "Before the fence went up I tried to make a kind of sound portrait of the area, which ended up drifting from documenting to using the landscape and objects as instruments with which to play and compose music. I‘ve briefly considered doing this again but such projects are just too polite an intervention to really tackle what is actually happening there. The only logical extension of the trespassing project would have to be called Vandalising the Olympic Site."

Cornford's sound work tends to involve traditional instruments (piano, violin, electric guitar) being played in a non-traditional, often mechanical, almost always aleatoric, fashion, in order to bypass, as he says on his website, his own "untrained hands": "I had maybe a dozen piano lessons at primary school, but I hated them. That said I did used to love playing on my step-father’s piano, though never from a score, playing very much in the childlike sense of the word, just listening to the piano really. It’s been very important to me in my current musical practice to distance myself from the creation of sounds – usually using technology, so that my relationship with the music is first and foremost as a listener rather than a player." The present work, Three Piece, involves a similar hands-free instrumentalism, giving us three mobile sculptures, each made largely out of bicycle parts and discarded construction material (Cornford was initially trained as a sculptor and sees, inherent in this kind of bricolage, "a critique of the society that deems objects to no longer have a value and disposes of them.") along with an electric guitar or bass - choosing, at all times, the cheapest, most non-specific looking axes available on Ebay - and a loudspeaker. Each guitar spins in perpetual motion, both on its own axis, and around a central pivot, like a planet in orbit, and as it does so generates its own noise. The audience are invited to walk around the sculptures as they please, experiencing the change in sound from place to place across the room, something done by most with a certain apprehension, not to mention a sense of personal danger given that any moment the headstock of a Les Paul Special might come careering into the small of one's back. "My sculptures have tended to be slightly confrontational for years now, but this is the most explicitly confrontational thing I have ever done – it invades your space, it’s greedy, it’s dangerous. The work without a member of the audience isn’t really a work at all, it’s completed by your interaction with it, by your hearing and your movement. I didn’t set out to make something necessarily confrontational at all, I was more interested at the time of construction in the way that the audience’s movement constructs their listening experience, it was a reaction against the passive standing or seated reception of frontal stereo music, that has been my normal concert/gig going experience. I wanted to make a concert that you could walk among, so the listener decides what’s in the foreground of the mix." The title refers to the guitar-bass-drums set-up of a standard rock band, and this kind of deconstructive approach to the rock tradition clearly owes a certain debt to Christian Marclay. "I am drawn to the iconographies, both of the classical and rock tradition, particularly of the piano (as the site of serious composition) and the guitar (as a rite of passage of youthful exuberance amongst other things). And no matter how many times these iconographies have been meddled with or completely overturned they still hold an incredible amount of cultural power." The appearance of the sculptures themselves recalls the ad-hoc neo-dadaism of Robert Rauschenberg's combines, and the sound they produce, in its drifting sonorities and relentless guitar distortion, is reminiscent of drone-rockers Earth and Sunn O))). "I never had a sound in my head that I wanted it to make," claims Cornford, "But ultimately that is the point, to make something which is unpredictable, that has a life of its own, that is experimental in the literal sense of the word, something, as Cage said “of which the outcome is not known”. Along the way the resultant music has gone through phases of being both deeply frustrating and very pleasing. One day it’s subtle, full of detail and variation, the next it’s virtually flat. That's life."

For tonight's private view, the 'rock band' formula is completed by two improvising drummers, Patrick Farmer (whose MySpace page claims proudly, "I love rhizomes"), and Rob Gawthrop (half of the Automated Noise Ensemble, and senior lecturer at Dartington College of Arts), brought in to accompany the spinning guitars. Unfortunately the relatively quiet output of the guitar mobiles was almost immediately dwarfed by Farmer and Gawthrop's somewhat relentless percussive assault, pedalling through a battery of avant-garde tricks and turns (bowed cymbals, rubbing different textures across drum skins, heavy use of the drum rims, knocking things over, etc.) with scant regard for respecting the softer, subtler sound of the work they were supposed to be backing up and enhancing. Once Farmer and Gawthrop had left Cornford's work behind, they seemed to find it very hard to find it again and thenceforth relied largely on playing off each other, building up, here and there, some delightful interlocking polyrhythms, but ultimately engulfing, rather than enriching, the experience of the sound sculptures. Cornford agrees, "I thought both Patrick and Rob excelled themselves, but I never felt that their playing and the sound produced by the guitars melded into one. This was mostly a problem of balance. I mean when a rock band plays a gig, no matter what sort of music they are playing there’s a standard way of micing, mixing and amplifying them so they can hear themselves, hear each other, and the audience gets a perfectly balanced mix. Achieving that effect while completely re-writing the rules was always going to be hard: the drums being all acoustic, the guitars only going through little 40W amps and very cheap un-housed speakers, and the whole thing being spread around the room, so with hindsight the ensemble effect I was hoping for was pretty unrealistic. Even on a good day balancing the three streams of audio from the guitars was hard, let alone with drums on top. Add to those technical issues the fact that the drummers were improvising and no matter what they do, the machines are just not going to react, so in the end I think they were playing more off each other than they were off the guitar sounds. Like most of my work the performance was an experiment, and a strategy I would like to explore further in the future." Given greater amplitude on the guitars, or a more delicate, nuanced approach to the drums, it could have been an extraordinary performance, doing, perhaps, for David Toop's work with Max Eastley what Glenn Branca did for American minimalism. It remained, nonetheless, a thrilling and quite beguiling experience.