Kassel Jaeger Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 2 Items

Black Truffle is pleased to present Meith, a new composition in two parts from prolific composer/theorist François Bonnet. Usually operating under his Kassel Jaeger moniker, Bonnet is a major figure in contemporary electronics and electro-acoustic music, collaborating with artists such as Lucy Railton, Jim O’Rourke, and Stephen O’Malley, and releasing his work on labels including Editions Mego, Senufo, and Shelter Press. Always meticulously detailed yet immediately affecting, Bonnet’s work situates itself at a very personal intersection between the traditions of academic electronic and electroacoustic music, and a more shadowy, underground group of approaches to experimental sound: kosmische Musik, the tape murk of the 1980s underground, the haunted ambience of Christoph Heemann & Co. Meith immediately welcomes us into its densely layered sound world of electronic tones, positive organ, and unidentifiable field-recorded textures. Almost static yet constantly in flux, it deliberately opens itself up to repeated and varied listening: from a distance, its many voices cohere into a monolithic plane of sound, while closer inspection reveals myriad details and momentary events. Like a drop of ink spreading through water, harmonic material present in one voice gradually fans out into the whole arrangement, creating fleeting moments of unity amid the constantly shifting waves of tone and texture. Far from the austerity of some contemporary electro-acoustic music, Meith affects the listener as overwhelming organic; its individual layers are unstable and at times near-chaotic, imbued with life. Though it can appear almost formless, the piece undergoes major shifts throughout its duration, from the austere dissonance of the opening moments to the surging harmonies that appear midway through the second side before the piece gradually dissolves into a spectral glimmer. Francis Plagne.

Franco-Swiss composer François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, returns to Shelter Press with his new solo album, Shifted in Dreams. Over the years, Bonnet has been working closely with Shelter Press on different projects, whether as a musician (Zauberberg, Swamps / Things), a theorist (The Music To Come) or as Director of parisian institution INA GRM (spectres, Recollection GRM, Portraits Grm). The common axis of all these actions is the exploration of the deep causes of music, its own potential and its possible appearances. Shifted in Dreams is a continuation of such research but takes a somewhat deviated path. If we use the metaphor of music as a paradoxical mountain — an unreachable “Mont Analogue”, then this record tries to opens up a way that at first seems simpler and marked out by the distinct presence of familiar harmonic and temporal elements. This path, however, is simple only in appearance, for soon it becomes less clear: its contours get blurred, drowned in the mist. Silhouettes form in the distance, like uncertain shadows. We grope our way forward, in this infra-sensitive thickness of the world outside of signs. The recognized markers disappear, giving way, at best, to reminiscences, but increasingly making way to qualities, occurrences, events. We leave the known world of musical codes to join that of sound apparitions, their memorial imprints and the impressions they produce. Following a compositional approach stemming from the musique concrète tradition, without adopting a structuralist aesthetic, Shifted in Dreams explores a wide range of instruments and techniques, going seamlessly from instrumental improvisation to field recording, via micro- editing and asynchronous looping. Mixing the electronic waves of an ARP 2500 synthesizer with the acoustic drones of a positive organ, articulating guitar layers with resonances of a Cristal Baschet, bringing together recordings of slamming windows and sounds produced by complex modular synthesis patches, among other things, Bonnet offers a rich and generous palette of sounds, inviting a constantly renewed sonic investigation. Shifted in Dreams, despite its title, is not a dreamlike record. The dream here does not designate the symbolical space of interpretation and reinterpretation of reality through cultural patterns. It designates the intermediate, blurred and uncertain state where the reality of signs loses its consistency, while, paradoxically, the reality of senses and impressions becomes imperative, obvious. The reality of demons