A major work in Francois Bayle's repertoire, Jeita ou murmure des eaux provides a journey and an immersion into a world of unleashed energies, with the Jeita cave serving both as a backdrop and a particle accelerator. Here, the cave indeed stands for the concrete source of the composer's inspiration as much as the mind space where metamorphoses occur. By combining such figurative spaces and immaterial sound projections, Francois Bayle evokes another subject, an inhabitant of the multiple and symbolic cave: the listening subject, who always reveals himself, implicitly, at the heart of Francois Bayle's musical concerns and the path he has always defended: the acousmatic approach. -Francois J. Bonnet, Paris, 2025
Few years ago, an idea germinated while reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible auratic journey trough the memories of a place lost in the heights of the swiss mountains. A century after the events depicted in the book, we went where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and the ghosts who might have still wandered around. Zauberberg is based on these captures, on recordings of the music played by Hans Castorp (the novel's main character), on acoustic/electronic instrumentation and digital processing. The result is an evokation of time and duration, an exploration of what remains and what is lost, a meditation of the dissolution and persistence of the aura surrounding everything. - Kassel Jaeger, Nov. 19, 2015
Jana IRMERT « Portals » Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception. Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transposition, and placing it back in the realm of the audible, Jana Irmert invites and guides us on a fascinating exploration of an unsuspected, speculative and non-human world of sound, which she exposes and recomposes in a way that is both respectful and personal, accompanying this teeming and fascinating sound material in a musical gesture of great clarity. Portals is an attempt to access the evocative power of an Amazonian forest on the brink of catastrophe, through a decentring of the listening experience delicately composed by Jana Irmert. 7038634357 « Rope » With uncommon mastery and precision, Rope unfolds in a suspended time that seems nonetheless ominous. As it's title suggests, Rope explores the formal figure of the rope, as an interweaving of synthetic and natural fibres that hold and amalgamate, held together by the forces of tension and friction. The rope itself, as Neo Gibson explains, is knotted at regular intervals along it's entire length, so that you can hang on to it. Rope unfolds slowly, evolving from the threshold of the perceptible towards denser, more ballasted electronic textures, but always on the brink of an upheaval to come. Then a melodic motif appears, seeming to carry within it an impossible consolation. In this respect, Rope balances strikingly between formal elegance, sonic gravity and an emotional charge that is almost uncontainable.
With But remember what you have had, Stephen O'Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O'Malley's work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O'Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O'Malley's repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.
