Sous le regard d’un soleil soir is an electroacoustic melodrama, the first of Cycle des Profondeurs, which, along with Forêt profonde and the soon to be completed La cri du Choucas, takes its text from psychiatric writings, in this case the famous Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. The ideas that have inspired each piece of this cycle are not only part of the piece but have been transmuted into musical ideas.

In Sous le regard d’un soleil soir, this is clearest in the kind of layering so easy and natural to tape music—any sound can be played simultaneously with any other sound; any sound can be played against itself, lined up exactly or offset. One voice can be saying various different things on several different tracks at once. This is most humorously—but seriously—done where a man says “I’m an individual” and “I’m an in divide you all” and also “I’m no one” and “I’m a no un.” This is followed by another man saying something about one’s inner self losing its identity and integrity, which is an uncomfortable thing to happen to a person, but a pleasant and positive thing to happen to a sound.

And so on. And as the “characters” talk about the real and the unreal, the outside and the inside, one finds oneself listening ever more carefully to the sounds of this piece, to the natural and artificial, to the strictly musical and to the voices talking—and ultimately unable, as it should be, to distinguish them in those ways.

Listen here to clips.