| Page 8 WOMAN IN THE DUNES The piece is inspired by a book by Kobo Abé. There is also a film which is very good too. The memory of the film was brought back after reading Andrea Dworkin’s book “INTERCOURSE”. After reading the book, and while doing some work at Goldsmith’s College in London with musician-composer/improviser - Hugh Davies, I decided to make a piece of electronic music using old digital and analogue technology. Hugh very kindly helped and advised me, and was integral in helping mix the 16 tracks. He was also able to show how to write sound diagrams for the old Roland Studio System 100M 191 – J, which the college wanted to throw away, but Hugh insisted they didn’t. The score is under this text. Click on the blue title in esnips box (just above the score) if you want to hear the nine-minute piece. Dworkin writes: In "The Woman in the Dunes”, a man gets lost in sand dunes and is trapped with a woman in a deep hole in the dunes where she lives; he is kept prisoner there, to keep clearing away the sand (“The village keeps going because we never let up clearing away the sand…..”), to have sex with her; the sand rots everything, including his skin; it is a pervasive physical reality, coarse, intensifying every physical feeling and movement, every moment of survival; he has sex with the woman that is different from the sex in civilization; he tries to escape, fights the sand, is brought back; the hole is the woman, being in it is like being in her; the sand is the burying, enveloping, suffocating, killing quality of sex with a woman, being surrounded by her; the sand on the skin, in the mouth, on her labia, brings the skin to life, to feeling, to intensity, to sex that is not alienated or abstract; in the end, the man chooses to stay in the hole in the dune with the woman.” (INTERCOURSE - Arrow Books)                
Dedicated to the memory of Hugh Davies |
