Locus Solus

John Woolrich’s Locus Solus is a 12-minute scherzando, mostly fast music placed around a still centre. Its title comes from Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel of the same name, in which an inventor has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus (‘a solitary place’). There he shows them a series of inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness, with innumerable ramifications: an aerial pile-driver constructing a mosaic of teeth, a gigantic diamond filled with what water in which floats a dancing girl, a hairless cat, the preserved head of Danton and, finally, eight death-haunted tableaux vivants.