Audiopile Review: François Bonnet aka Kassel Jaeger is un grand fromage in the world of electro-acoustic composition. MF is director of Paris’s legendary Ina-GRM institute/studio/whatever, ffs. He’s kinda une grosse affaire. That means ‘a big deal’. It just sounds much worse in French. But what typically sounds awesome in French (or at least from France) is electro-acoustic music. GRM is a central part of an august electronic music legacy, and Bonnet has done an enormous amount to bring it into contact with today’s grassroots experimental-electronic scene (see the Mego-associated Portraits GRM label for evidence). Appropriately, then, the music Bonnet composes and releases as Kassel Jaeger is anything but dry or academic. It owes a lot to the post-industrial dark ambient and noise scenes, while also representing the best today’s cutting-edge acousmatic tools have to offer. On ‘Fernweh’ from 2012 (and newly re-released via Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label), this manifests itself in immersive granular washes and cascades of pebbly texture. More than anything, it manifests in a distinctly 21st-century approach to the drone. Where traditional drone-based composition focused on sustained notes with overtones dancing atop, the age of DSP magic has produced monumental drones that teem with ear-boggling tones and timbres. Bonnet is a master of this approach, and his mastery is more than adequately displayed on ‘Fernweh’.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger’s Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet’s electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). 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. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid ‘closeness’; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space. Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the INA 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.