There has been a flurry of interest on social media in Belgium composers, so I am giving a heads up to a composer who is unlikely to feature elsewhere. Jean-Luc Fafchamps was born in Brussels in 1960, and his music is topically relevant because of its transcultural sub-agenda and its brutally contemporary idiom – one reviewer has described him as writing in an “appealingly post-everything style, with diatonic minimalist gestures butting up against wheezy microtonal drones and so forth”. Jean-luc Fafchamps is not a Sufi or a Muslim, but his quest for a compositional system based on analogue correspondences led him to the symbolic charts known as Sufi Words created in 16th century Mughal India. He uses Sufi symbology as a compositional tool in much the same way as John Cage and his circle used the I Ching, and my 2012 post gives more details of his composing system. Lettres Soufies is envisaged as a vast network of cycles, two of which have been recorded by the Brussels based Sub Rosa label. There is an extended sample below to allow you to decide for yourself if Jean-luc Fafchamps’ music is appealingly or appallingly post-everything.
Pliable, Thursday, March 24, 2016