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8 mins read 🤓

Doux Massacres
(Gentle Slaughter, or My Xmascoat in Brussels)

april 7, 2025

Doux massacres (sweet massacres, gentle slaughter) is one of the many expressions that emerged when some time ago I started to indulge in forcing words into a sudoko format, by demanding a text to be composed of nine lines, each line of nine words, and each word to have the number of letters read off a sudoku grid. On each of the nine lines nine words, each of those nine words of a different length, between one and nine letters long. French words, or English. Or words in whatever alphabetically written language. (The grid I used, for starters, was the same as the one that gave Applaus!.)

Doux massacres popped up in the first ever French 'sudokoem', as I propose to call this novel textual format 😊. Here is how eventually I rendered the result:

“Ah, doux massacres, philo phases. Jordanie a don caboche
o Roi religion fraîche, cyclistes si étain opaque. FAUX.
Recel étoile brûlant. OPA e lima en déployer chaussure.
Goulag bains y, apparues koch, épi refusée. Flamboyer ok.
Monuments délégué si moreau alibi à mec legs scission.
Tom Euphrate, West bousiller. Tu tablies Godard, j'exilé
lieu qualifiés lutte ru fer débris témoigne. Annoncé d'
oxygène, e ouf club, éloigner vôtre cherchait or. Billet
illustré. On joujou à Managua. Hydravion dame Pérou. Out.”

The recorded reciting of a number of (French and English) sudokoems was part of the audio material that I selected for use in the 110th unPublic that occurred on March 25th in the Ateliers Claus studio in Brussels, and the concert the day after, on Wednesday March 26th, in the Grand Hospice. You can hear the recited sudokoem in the (slightly edited) recording of the finale of that concert, for which I feel 'gentle slaughter' to be quite a fitting title.

Setting up for that impro-concert/performance with Yi Huinjun (guzheng, voice) and Shih-wen Lee (double bass) at the 54th OMFI (One Moment Free Improvisation) evening in the Grand Hospice chapel in Brussels, on Wednesday March 26th, I found myself just short of being made a Xmas tree.

“Is it worth to be a Xmas tree?

Do u want to be a Xmas tree?

Do I want to be a Xmas tree?

Do u like Xmas trees?

...

No? Not your stuff?

What day is today?
And what is the time?

I do not want to think.
I do not want to think.
I do not want to think.
I do not want to think.
I do not want to think...

But, mais ça me fait penser, it made me think—I'm sort of unsure, I hesitate wat voor taal ik moet spreken vanavond—jij zegt 'ja, ja, ja, ja' ... want jij spreekt Vlaams ... ja, kerstboom ... Hou je van kerstbomen? ...

Waarom moet ik vanavond zo denken aan kerstbomen? Het doet me denken aan kerstbomen omdat, als ik hier die flikkerende lampjes zie dan denk ik, je pense, I am reminded of the Xmas trees that we used to have in my parents' house. And when my father died, the house became my mom's house. The town where I was born and the houses I grew up in, those are my roots. They come with a number. That number is nine. The house of my mom, my mother's house, my parents' house, bore number nine.

And all the years, as far back as I remember, when nights got longer and days got darker an got colder, a Xmas tree was brought into the house on number nine. A-and on the days, in the weeks, the months, the years that I still was a kid, a lóóóng time ago, that Xmas tree was very

big !!!

Ohhh...!!!

So bbbbiiiigggg!!!

Its top hit the ceiling, you see, and one had to bent it a bit in order to make it fit. To me that tree looked sóóóóóó big...

But when the years passed, with me growing up, me getting bigger... the tree... got smaller, ever smaller, and smaller, and smaller...

That is what I thought and then said to myself. “It is getting smaller, smaller, smaller”...

For a very long time, though, it was a real tree, a living tree that had been cut down out there in a real forest.

Then somewhere in the steady flow of years that passed, my mother bought a Xmas tree that one could fold and fit in a box. And there came to be the Xmas time when the tree no longer was a real tree.

I do not remember exactly when it was, but starting from some one day Xmas time in the temporally ordered set of my mom's Xmas times, and for all that then were still to come after, the tree was made of plastic. Each year that followed, when Xmas passed, my mother folded up the Xmas tree. She stuck it in a cardboard box and put that on top of the clothes wardrobe in her bedroom. Then she took it off again the next year, decorated it with the same handfull of colored balls, the same paper garlands, sprayed its plastic green needles with little bits of snow foam from the same can, pinched on the same little lights that only shone on Xmas days... like the ones that tonight here at the Hospice light up my coat... and then, finally, she put the spike on top of the tree, the proud crown of its creation.

So it went, on and on and on and on. Time ticked on and years went down the drain, dripping away like droplets from a leaking tap, relentlessly, until ... it is a sad story, you all know how it ends ... until one day, yes, also the tree and its decorations got sent to the local waste dump. Then there was no longer no more nothing in my mother's house. Least of all a plastic Xmas tree.

Sort of the same is happening with all of this other stuff you see here, the electrified electronic and mechanic tools. These instruments. Technology. Cassette tapes. Millions of these things were made in the 1970s and 1980s.

Do you still have a walkman?
Do you know what that is?
And if you still have, or if you would find one, can you give it to me?
Please do do!
Because they are my instruments.
As Magister Rébus one day rightly claimed: (‘topologically‘) a walkman is equivalent to a trumpet. The walkman has three buttons (for play, rewind and fast-forward) that the casseter, its player, uses to alter the sound produced; just like the three valves on a trumpet for the trumpeter to use.

But have a good look, and a good listen to the one that I am holding here. After all these years, you hearsee what has happened?

The thing just does not work any more.”

...

It was an OMFI moment that inspired me telling this story. It was another OMFI moment that made me decide to put the very last of my Sony TCM-200DV dictaphones out of its misery, and mine, after many, many years.

...

Et hop ! ... there it goes ...

With a hefty bow throw, my broken dictathing arced gracefully through the small chapel's space—like in a pro pitcher's throw, along a fluid and forcefully firm curved path—before hitting an unyielding stone wall, spitting out its batteries, bumping once, twice, maybe thrice, then slide along the floor, before coming to a halt and lay STILL, wrapped in a brief, almost tense, silence in the Hospice chapel.

...

It was the 54th OMFI, and (at least) the third one in which I had the pleasure to participate. (I was in at least two other editions, with magister Rébus. Those were the 32nd, in Brussels on June 2nd 2018, and City Sonic ones, in September 2015, in the Belgian city of Mons, in the wake of the SQWWO at the Brussels' recyclart.)

This time we were three, (Huijun, Shih-wen, me), and we performed in almost all possible combinations that can be made given three players (we did all three possible duets, we did the trio, but only one of the three possible solos 🤓). It all began with the evening's, a guzheng/voice impro by Jun; then there was a first duet by Shih-wen & I/me, that began with my Xmas trees reminiscences. It was followed by Jun & Shih-wen. Then there was a break, after which there were Jun & I, and we ended the evening as a trio, culminating in Jun's strong voice chanting right under the very high and forcefully reverberatinging rooftop of the chapel.

You can re-hear the final trio, ‘Doux Massacres’, in the slightly edited version of a mix of a couple of audio recrodings of the performance, now on SoundCloud.

One particular little thread in the sonic tapestries that were woven that evening at the Grand Hospice seemed of truly magical origin. I had brought three ultra-cheap dictaphones, of Taiwanese (Wonder) and Chinese (GoldYip) origin. These I had wanted to use for the making of a surround-layered low-volume lo-fi soundscape, like in our cassette-rituals (unPublic #4 and unPublic #79), by putting them on three sides of the chapel, playing back three randomly chosen cassettes from my 'chronique sonore' archive.

But in the flux of doing, things, as always and as expected, never proceed as vaguely plannend before the event. Also, these cheap replicas are highly unreliable, and I actually merely demonstrated their (un-)workings as part of my Xmastree discourse.

No sound was coming from their small speakers, when at the end of my story, I placed the dictaphones on top of the piano in the back of the chapel, to focus on the tools to use in the impro part with Shih-wen. That part done, I sat down on the side. Huijun took over, playing her duet with Shih-wen. And it was towards the end of their duo impro, that suddenly voices began to speak softly along to the guzheng and double bass, from one of the dictaphones that I had placed on top of the piano, and, as I found a bit later, had forgotten to push the 'stop' button, as, well, the moment I put it there, it was making no sound that I could hear.

As if by magic, then, the duet sort of ended trio-like.

tags: Brussels, Xmas

# .554.