François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician based in Paris. In addition to being the Director of INA GRM (Institut national de l'audiovisuel / Groupe de Recherches Musicales -- the latter being one of the birthplaces of electroacoustic experimentation in the late 1950's), François J. Bonnet is also a writer and theoretician: his books The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, The Infra-World, and After Death are published in English by Urbanomic. He is also the author of the manifesto The Music to Come, published by Shelter Press in 2020, and the co-editor of the SPECTRES series of publications, a joint project of INA GRM and Shelter Press. As a musician, Bonnet often works under the project name Kassel Jaeger. He has collaborated with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen O'Malley, Jim O'Rourke, Akira Rabelais, James Rushford, or Gisèle Vienne. Kassel Jaeger's works are a complex balance between concrète experimentalism, ambient noise, and electroacoustic improvisation. He has released several albums on various labels such as Editions Mego, Shelter Press, Black Truffle, Senufo Edition, etc. While his own music has been played in renowned venues and festivals all over the world, François J. Bonnet has been working closely with groundbreaking composer and electronic music pioneer Eliane Radigue, and has been performing regularly her electronic music in concert.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
SED 073LP
|
Sedimental presents the newest work, A Rift In the Horizon's Wall (ARITHW), from Paris-based electronic musician and sound artist Kassel Jaeger (François Bonnet), realized during a week-long artist residency at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, Vermont in June of 2023. In addition to creating and performing ARITHW he also performed Eliane Radigue's "L'île resonante," bookending the week. ARITHW was developed during an artist residency at the Epsilon Spires art center based in Brattelboro, VT, USA. During this residency, François J. Bonnet appropriated the space to create original music. Using their 1906 Estey 3-Manual Organ Pipe as his primary source, Bonnet then set about exploring secondary instrumental sources, such as the in house grand piano, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the acoustics of the three-tiered sanctuary of the former historic church (built 1889) that is now Epsilon Spires. ARITHW unfolds like an interstice, a gap between two frames on a flat surface generated by the organ, a surface that shatters to reveal an unclear, ghostly, and elusive space. In this work, Bonnet focuses on more instrumental material, only to subvert it and dilute it further before melting it into an uncertain acoustic space that evokes reminiscences of Erik Satie, Walter Marchetti, or even Eliane Radigue, as well as his own previous music and the liminal electroacoustic climates that have been his trademark for many years. A profound work of subtle complexity and suspended tension. ARITHW also refers to the vernacular literary mythology of New England, a land, at the same time, still attached to Europe and torn from it. The album artwork consists of works by Bonnet, with the first edition accompanied by a limited edition of 70 unique engravings produced by the artist at Brattleboro-based First Proof Press. The residency and project were made possible by a Jazz & New Music Creation Grant from FACE Foundation, Supporting French-American Cultural Exchange in Education and the Arts. François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician based in Paris. He is a writer and theoretician: his books The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, The Infra-World, and After Death are published in English by Urbanomic. He is also the co-editor of the SPECTRES series of publications. As a musician, Bonnet often works under the project name Kassel Jaeger. He has collaborated with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen O'Malley, Jim O'Rourke, Akira Rabelais, James Rushford and Gisèle Vienne.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
SHELTER 144LP
|
Franco-Swiss composer François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, returns to Shelter Press with a new solo album, Shifted in Dreams. Bonnet has been working closely with Shelter Press for several years now, whether as a musician (Zauberberg, Swamps / Things), theorist (The Music To Come), or director of INA GRM (SPECTRES, Recollection GRM, Portraits GRM). Each of these directions taken, each of these actions carried out, is an exploration and an attempt to understand 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 you use the image of music as a paradoxical mountain, as an unreachable "Mont Analogue", this album tries to opens up a way that at first seems simpler, marked out, known and recognized thanks to the distinct presence of common 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. You grope your 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. You 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 the use of asynchronous loops. Mixing the electronic sounds of an ARP 2500 synthesizer with the acoustic drones of a positive organ, articulating guitar layers with the resonance of the Cristal Baschet, bringing together recordings of slamming windows and sound produced by complex modular synthesis patches, 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.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
BT 069LP
|
2021 restock. Black Truffle 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 you 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.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2LP
|
|
SHELTER 119LP
|
Over the last decade, Kassel Jaeger, the moniker of the Paris-based composer, writer/theorist, producer, and director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), François Bonnet, has meticulously sculpted a body of multidisciplinary work that rests at the forefront contemporary electronic and electroacoustic practice. Jaeger's work across numerous fields, be it in text, action, or sound presents a crucial bridge between the optimistic, philosophical origins of electronic and electroacoustic music, the present and where they have yet to delve. With his first solo LP with Shelter Press, Swamps / Things, Kassel Jaeger wades into this foggy, conceptual realm. From memory and metaphor -- sliding fluidly through the imagistic and emotive -- emerges an immersive, cavernous world that rethinks electroacoustic music on organic terms. Swamps / Things was conceived as an opera without distinct characters or text. It draws Kassel Jaeger into his own history, experiences, and the unlikely double of the swamp, a landscape that has held literal and metaphorical sway over him since childhood. Merging eight works as a total environment, abstaining from distinct shape or discrete articulation, across the album's breadth, sound becomes a shifting mirror for the bubbling, ordered chaos of organic life. Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena, Swamps / Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc. Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world -- memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought. From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures -- captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms -- moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth. Swamp / Things features contributions from Jim O'Rourke and Lucy Railton. Jaeger has previously collaborated with Stephen O'Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, James Rushford, and others. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, cut at Dubplates & Mastering. Printed artwork by Cameron Jamie on inner and outer reverse-board jackets.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
LTNC 017LP
|
"A new work by François J. Bonnet -- the director of INA GRM -- deconstructing the binarity 'smooth' and 'striated'. 'If 'smooth' is linked to 'nomos', within an open space of organic distribution, then 'striated' is associated with 'logos', as a kind of gridded enclosure. An interplay is mapped out, whereby pulsations become textures and layers, and where rhythmic elements are teased from the qualities and densities of sounds, rather than deployed as pre-determined sound objects in their own right, abstracted and frozen onto a temporal grid. 'Striation' is made audible only through the sonic landscape it inhabits, in the same way that animal camouflage comes alive in the woods and long grass, becoming redundant and inert out in the open.'"
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2LP
|
|
EMEGO 235LP
|
The frontier for French electroacoustic mystical music has traversed much ground since Pierre Schaeffer shuffled on the past and laid out a map without borders or designated ground. Seventy years in this land of the fried, there are a plethora of Ideas and ongoing potential coming from all corners of the globe. Inheriting the wisdom of past masters whilst forging a signature style of his own, Kassel Jaeger sits as one of the premier explorers of these unknown worlds today. Comprised recently recorded tracks, Kassel Jaeger presents a work of revisits and re-workings, one which acts as a hinge in both closing this particular chapter, whilst opening up the windows to a new sound world. In Aster, rich deep music is replete with dark ambient sonorities swirling amongst intense buzzing tones. Often chilling and ominous, this is a fearless music with abstracted corners and dynamic leverage. Unafraid to embed itself in the ongoing whirlpool of sonic progress. Jaeger's output remains a thrilling body of exploration and ongoing transformation. Photos by Ende Wieder; Design by Stephen O'Malley.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
EMEGO 183LP
|
Kassel Jaeger is a Swiss-French artist based in Paris, France, and is a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). Toxic Cosmopolitanism is his second full-length release for Editions Mego -- a release which explores and questions the very nature of the material experiments contained within. Each side consists of two clearly-defined sections based on the same material. Side A comprises of "Toxic Cosmopolitanism," a large-scale work based on distinct sounds of different cultures, instruments such as the balafon, tremolo, gnbri, gee, Tibetan gongs, pan flutes and the like are all deployed but rendered of the sonic properties identifying them to a specific region. The question that lies at the heart of this experiment: is such a swirl a creative process or a destructive one -- this is the ambiguity of toxic cosmopolitanism. "Exposure Scales 1-4" use sounds exclusively derived from the "Toxic Cosmopolitanism" material. Whereas "TC" is more about subjecting sounds to structure, "Exposure Scales" builds almost static textures. The results are an honest exploration of both culture and form. At once cerebral, enlightening and immensely rich in scope and sonic vision.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
EMEGO 149LP
|
Kassel Jaeger is a French-Swiss artist based in Paris and a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). Deltas is his fifth album, and first on vinyl. "Campo Del Cielo" (2012): Commissioned by Espace Mendes France for a performance at The Planetarium in Poitiers, France, diffused on an 8-channel system. The sound material is exclusively derived and processed from stone recordings. The first part, "Aerolite (flying stone)," is mainly based on aerial field recording of stone manipulations. The second part, "Baetylus (sacred stone)," is made with electromagnetic capture of meteorite resonances. This meteorite was part of the Campo Del Cielo site. "Deltas" (2012): "Whenever the volume of water is so great as to counteract and almost neutralize the force of tides and currents, and in all cases where the latter agents have not sufficient power to remove to a distance, the whole of the sediment periodically brought down by rivers, deltas are produced." "A Guest + a Host α" (2011): Commissioned for Ina-GRM's Retro/Actif at La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France. Originally displayed on 16 channels, this work is exclusively composed with non-processed and original sounds made with the legendary Coupigny Modular Synth housed in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales' studios. This work is structured as three dialectical parts: electricity + crystals = spectrum. "A Guest + Host = Ghost" (M. Duchamp). Mastered with Robert Hampson at 116 Bunker, Paris, May 2012. Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering, Berlin, July 2012. Layout by Stephen O'Malley.
|
|
|
|