Hughes De Courson – Lux Obscura (2003)

One of the most frustrating records on record: this is like a dumb remix (there’s a tautology for you) of a great album, except we can’t get the original and we’re stuck with the insufferable ersatz. If possibly nothing I ever heard ever called for a remix, this certainly calls for a demix, and if Hughes de Courson came to his senses he should re-release it minus the moronic beats. As it is, half of this is infuriatingly unlistenable; the other half is frustratingly listenable, as it hints to what the rest could have been.

While one can sometimes feel, and especially think, that there is something a bit forced in Courson’s crossover releases, mixing classical music with other musical traditions and cultures (as in Bach to Africa (really?), Mozart in Egypt (his best), or (brace yourselves) O'stravaganza: Fantasy on Vivaldi and the Celtic Music of Ireland), the interweaving sophistication of his ecumenical approach usually makes it intriguing and enjoyable enough, even when not entirely convincing in conceptual terms.

Here, the flirt with dance music, over medieval material (by the likes of Guillaume de Machaut, who would surely beat himself up for not having thought of laying down some chill grooves all up on his motets first, and have them court ladies leave it all out on the palace dance floor), just comes across as an opportunistic afterthought, with no organic justification, brutishly superimposed upon the, as usual, very enticing instrumental and vocal work, for which a stellar cast of performers was assembled (such as Gilles Chabenat and Brian Gulland), only to then largely waste that unique bounty of talent in an equally one-of-a-kind operation of artistic vandalism. Curiously, this also includes two numbers with Courson's previous partner in the all-mighty Malicorne, Gabriel Yacoub, who is spared the downtempo treatment, out of respect one assumes (or loyauté, as the title of one of the compositions he sings suggests), which must be a sign that Courson had some sense of the mess he was making by jumping on the Enigma bandwagon, but decided to go through with it all the same, like people pouring ketchup all over their lobster Thermidor.

Could all this egregious sabotage be conceptually taken as an aural approximation to the artistic gesture informing Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing? Not even that; and it would hardly be any less regrettable for it. Besides, arguably, Low, of all people, had already made that point much more effectively in music, with their first muddled-tape recording of the spectrally gorgeous Will the Night - giving an added physical expression to its take on the precariousness of human entanglements (including, as it so sadly came all too soon to pass, theirs with each other, and ours with them), as conditioned by forces beyond our grasp - and even they had the later generosity of offering those less artistically forward-thinking of us an archetypal recording of the song, to be preserved in Plato's Cave for the ages. In this, as in so many things, one should take a page from those Mormons’ book. I miss them.

One of the good ones: