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Here, as mine ear could note, no plaint was heard
Except of sighs, that made th'eternal air
Tremble, not caus'd by tortures, but from grief
Felt by those multitudes, many and vast,
Of men, women and infants.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto IV

An evening in Limbo

"L'Nfer, un point de détail": this is an evening of pop with François Sarhan, created at the Metz Arsenal in 2006 where it caused quite a stir. Not exactly a show, but not a concert either. More a variety set in the shape of the Radio-Sarhan studio. The set offers up eight musicians and mikes, chamber music blended liberally with rock, computers, samples, words, bodies that speak, music that speaks. In a feverish, sarcastic atmosphere that evokes the heyday of experimental rock and seems to invoke the ghost of Zappa, a tight score explores in detail the rhythms, hesitations, pauses and resumptions of ordinary speech. And it is this ordinary speech that is the star of the show: the voice of narration, of the Dictaphone, of confession, of conversation. It inflicts its rhythm, modulates the phrasing, wakes up the writing.

It comes from various sources: pre-recorded voices (small girls, crowds, preachers), arrangements (Soft Machine, Frank Zappa), and original works by François Sarhan – with himself as the announcer.

It works by imitations, cover versions, free counterpoint (or remixes), all muddled together the way a radio programme on music news, or simply news, might be. The composer, like a radio presenter who has got the wrong studio, reels off a curious anecdote that refers to his own disappearance. And the music is off, following, splitting away, harmonising… From his laptop, Sarhan launches jingles that interrupt the flow or clash with what is being said. And then suddenly the curtain tears apart and Linda appears: she has sinned but she was a victim; she has met God and her confession will save her. This pastiche of religious shows by American television evangelists perfectly captures their words and sobs, conjuring up the obscene reality we now live in.

It is in this sense that it is an evening of pop, of course. No drum kit or guitar needed. As we all know, a fusion of popular and highbrow music has never happened and will never happen: the music on the page filters everything, absorbs everything. It is a jealous god. Fausto Romitelli has written for electric guitar and didn't pull his punches with the saturation, but Sarhan's L'Nfer has to be the first highbrow musical work that is authentically pop. What makes it pop is its shrinkage of the distance between the trivial and the obscene, between the anodyne, revealed by art, elevated to the dignity of a moving encounter, and the pornographic, cloaked with exposure by art. When the boundary gets blurred, when you give the spectator the task of distinguishing between the two things, with the danger they will merge, that's when the pop effect happens; your aesthetic compass spins wildly. It's a dangerous game, but Sarhan plays it relentlessly, enjoying the obscuring of boundaries and refusing to fall one way or the other. The story he tells us, coloured with a lethargic narcissism by his colourless voice, is one of errant souls who have even forgotten the way to Hell. He builds the work like a Purgatory. As long as he doesn't make us visit Limbo, the first circle of Hell according to Dante, which echoes with the endless sighs of those who didn't sin but who, through ignorance "serv'd not God aright."

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