SALVADOR DALI & IGOR WAKHEVITCH: ÊTRE DIEU

Igor Wakhevitch's score for Salvador Dali's audio visual « opera poème » (initialy written in 1927 but recorded in 1974). This is an obsessional, decadent, surrealist, provocative, grotesque, mystical, erotic musical comedy with Salvador Dali narratives, improvisations (in French). The music perfectly serves Dali and others actors' voices with a medley of strange synthesiser loops, creepy lysergic ambiences, expressionist string orchestra arrengements, percussive abstractions. This is clearly a visual work for the ears and gorgeously impregnated of mental pictures and dreamlike suggestions. An intriguing, ambitious audiovisual exhibition that remains really avant gardist with many ideas and a different atmosphere for each scene. Not a progressive rock classic but a historical phenomenon with a rather unique eccentric abstract musical painting

It is rare for someone to be a virtuoso in more than one field. Salvador Dalí is perhaps my favorite painter, but his branching out into the audio world is bizarre in an unwelcome way. Perhaps someone fluent in French could appreciate the experience better, but as an album, Être Dieu sends me to sleep. More than that- this may be the most monotonous thing I've ever forced myself to sit through: Recommended for those who want to hear a man talk in French for a very long time.

"Ouvertüre und Erster Auftritt" Thunderous narration and windy squalls compete with crashes and low synthesizer lead. An ominous choir enters. After a spell of narration, it sounds like extraterrestrials are firing lasers in an operating factory. This opus also contains dark orchestral movements, splashes of cymbals, and shrill feminine vocals.

"Zweiter Auftritt oder Kampf mit dem Engel" Bizarre percussion and dramatic speaking opens this second part. A lot of it is barely audible. Vocal passages are extremely eccentric. Operatic singing and strings make up the end.

"Dritter Auftritt und Erster Abgang" Menacing strings and the sound of a cockerel underscore a foreboding voice. Clucking continues. One might as well be listening to a sermon in barnyard. After the seventeen mark is the first trace of honest-to-god music. It's rock, and it's good! It is a stark and welcome contrast from the tedium to which the past hour was devoted. It is a shame that it goes away in favor of more talk, though eventually a shadowy organ arrives.

"Im Traum" This is a cut from someone's Halloween mix tape, complete with gales and moaning people. And it has dungeon sounds. I think. The music (?) morphs into something pleasantly cinematic halfway through.

"Vierter Auftritt oder Das Glaubensbekenntnis" Sounding like something from a made-for-TV fantasy movie, this has exotic chants and unusual sibilating. Arguing (I think) comes later. More talk (and more talk) follows. A breezy bit of nonsense takes up after a while. Then there's the circus music with the blurting of a word I don't know. Then footsteps. Then more talk. Then quiet.

"Finale und Zweiter Abgang" A thick choir opens the final movement. Much of this consists of distant strings. Piano bashing ensues. There are further cinematic qualities that represent one of the rare high points of this nearly three hour drudgery.

Finally, God is interviewed: Q: -What can you tell us about the night? A: -No comment. Q: -What can you tell us about the stars? A: -No comment... T! Although not all of the work (over two hours) maintains the quality of its creative peaks, far from being nonsense (as another reviewer mentions) it is a work on the senses. Igor Wakhevitch's music is largely visual. Dalí's literary images (e.g., exploding giraffes, the striptease of the Monalisa, etc.) are no less so. Together, they form an opera that has much of comic, much of rhapsodic and much of a cry of fed-upness. Which is a good thing, if one thinks that the world in which we live, facing demolition, not only cannot be represented by closed formats such as the pop song, but that these formats, far from being only in the realm of representations, are part of the causes of the madness disguised as normality in which we live.