FRANÇOIS DUFRÊNE

The works of the Nouveau Realiste artist François Dufrêne, along with that of Gil J Wolman and Brion Gysin, was a strong influence for experimental poets like Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck and Ake Hodell. He could be considered the younger of the first generation sound poets. Already in the Lettrist group when he was only 16 years old, with his own style marked by a hyper-powerful voice. In 1953, at the age of 23, he became Ultra-Lettrist, starting his first crirhythms by overpassing the alphabet in the perspective of the physical improvised scream. With the crirhythms sound poetry enters for the first time in the factory of projective sounds. In the beginning Dufrêne uses the tape recorder only to document his creations. These recordings showed him that through the tape machine his poems could reach deeper and wider creative dynamics. Since the mid-1950s the tape-machine became for him a poetical and experimental tool and Dufrêne fully develops its potentials with stereophonic recordings, as well as with the superimposition of his crirhythms. The loudspeaker amplifies sounds while the microphone captures even the most detailed concrete sound produced by his voice. The physical tempest he produces is a real concrete electronic sound attack. Dufrêne produced primitive, brutal poems opening the path of vocal sounds to contemporary composers: it’s known that Pierre Henry was deeply inspired by Dufrêne. (source: https://www.forcedexposure.com/artists/dufrene.francois.html)