France Jobin - Death is perfection, everything else is relative (2020)

Musing on the heavy stuff in a soothing and stealthily effective suite for Buchla 200 modular synth, Canadian electro-acoustic composer France Jobin presents an absorbingly womb-like side with a jagged coda primed for fans of Mika Vainio, Eliane Radigue’s ’Trilogie De La Mort’ or Deathprod.

“The last two years have seen me maintaining an association with an unusual bedfellow, death. The loss of Mika Vainio, as well as three members of my own family, has had a profound effect on me and spurred a lengthy reflection on life, death, and everything in between. Parallelly, while studying the philosophy of science, I came across shadow photons: “Tangible photons are the ones we can see or detect with instruments whereas shadow photons are intangible (invisible) detectable only indirectly through the interference effects on the tangible photons.

There is no intrinsic difference between tangible and shadow photons: each photon is tangible in one universe and intangible in all the other parallel universes. They travel at the speed of light, bounce off mirrors, are refracted by lenses, and are stopped by opaque barriers or filters of the wrong colour. Yet, they do not trigger even the most sensitive detectors. The only thing in the universe that a shadow photon can be observed to affect is the tangible photon that it accompanies. This is the phenomenon of interference.

Shadow photons would go entirely unnoticed, were it not for this phenomenon and the strange pattern of shadows by which we observe it. Thus the existence of a seething, prodigiously complicated hidden world of shadow photons has been inferred.”* I have drawn a parallel between shadow photons and death. The interference phenomena, parallel universes, and how shadow photons affect tangible photons they accompany, offer, in my opinion, similarities, an unknown universe which is death and how we, remaining tangible human beings, are affected. This quest has led me to be more willing to accept chaos in my life and to conclude that Death is perfection, everything else is relative.

*The fabric of reality, David Deutsch, Penguin Press 1997.”