In stock
LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Fernweh”
Black Truffle presents a new edition of Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet's electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith. Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe's impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet's approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O'Malley and Jim O'Rourke. A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title's meaning is close to the concept of "Wanderlust," fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls "climates." Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition -- with which Bonnet, as director of the GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar -- the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block. Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous "scenes," with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies. Like his friend and collaborator Jim O'Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.
28,00€
Out of stock
LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Shifted in Dreams”
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.
21,00€
Out of stock
LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Meith”
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.
20,50€
In stock
2 LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Swamps / Things”
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. On July 10th he will release his new album ‘Swamp / Things’ on Shelter-Press.
Rigorously experimental without sacrificing the intimacies of self, his efforts as a composer and musician extend across live contexts and numerous critically heralded solo releases, as well as collaborations with Jim O’Rourke and Lucy Railton, both contributing to the record, alongside Stephen O’Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, and James Rushford, and others.
Deeply invested in the potential of sound as an elemental form - a root phenomenon with a profound capacity for meaning, as much as a multidimensional material for creative process and ideas – 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.
Sound is abstract. When the source is elusive, narrative and meaning shift between the concrete and obscure. 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 8 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 - tapping the multidimensional potential for narrative and meaning possessed by each - 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.
A remarkably intimate and forward-thinking aural balm, bristling with complex beauty, Shelter press is overjoyed to present Kassel Jaeger’s Swamps / Things. Two immersive, intoxicating sides overflowing with humanity and ideas.
Sound material collected and performed by François J. Bonnet
with additional help by Lucy Railton (River Wensum Roe Deers) and Jim O’Rourke (NYC Bobcats).
Artwork by Cameron Jamie.
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.
Music composed by François J. Bonnet.
27,00€
Out of stock
LP
Kassel JAEGER
“Le Lisse et le Strié”
‘Le Lisse et le Strié’ is a new work by french composer François J. Bonnet, released under his project name Kassel Jaeger. Based in Paris, Bonnet is the Director of INA-GRM. He is also a writer and theoretician (The Order of Sounds, A Sonorous Archipelago and The Infra-World have been published in english by Urbanomic). As a musician, Bonnet has been collaborating with artists such as Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi or Jim O’Rourke and most of his recent work has been published by Editions Mego.
‘Le Lisse et le Strié’ has been conceived as an exploration of the two antagonist concepts of “smooth” and “striated”, applied to the realm of electroacoustic sounds. If the “smooth” is linked to “nomos” as an open space of organic distribution, the “striated”, on the contrary, is associated to “logos”, as an enclosed space defined by a grid.
Elaborating a dialogue between these aspects, Kassel Jaeger draws an intermediary space where pulsations become textures and layers, and where rhythmic elements are found in the qualities and bodies of sounds instead of being functionalised, pre-determined sound objects, abstracted and frozen onto a temporal grid. The concept of “striated” is audible only through the sonic landscape it inhabits, like the stripes of the camouflage fur of wild animals only exist as such in the woods and long grass, disappearing into a potential uselessness in a desert plain.
18,00€