CHARON
One night in February 2022, Abel Verheyden broke into St. Quentin’s Church in Tournai and settled in front of G. Delmotte’s organ. After a while, he turned on his recorder and improvised for an hour and a half. Listening back to the recording at home, he found both good and bad moments, eventually keeping a two-and-a-half-minute excerpt that struck him as particularly effective in the way it combined the gentleness and violence of the instrument’s different registers.
Later, he asked Louis Lemage, whose writing and voice he admires, to write a text about Charon’s warning to Orpheus on the Styx, without letting him hear the recording. Lemage sent him a draft which, with almost no editing, fitted perfectly over the organ excerpt when performed. The result is titled Charon: Seul l’Oubli Est Éternel.
The footage accompanying the spoken-word track is drawn from graphic research Verheyden was conducting at the same time for an experimental film about Orpheus and Eurydice, offering a contemporary interpretation of the lovers’ myth.
Photo credits: Dana Payen
