Kassel Jaeger
François J. Bonnet lives in Paris and is a Franco-Swiss composer, author and music theorist. Since 2007 he is a member of the Research Institute for Electroacoustic Music INA GRM and also ist director since 2018. He has published several books and is editor of the book series SPECTRES. François J. Bonnet produces the weekly program »L'Expérimentale« for Radio France Musique. His music, which is, among others, distributed by Editions Mego and Shelter Press can be heard at festivals and concerts worldwide.
Aliases: François J. Bonnet
Acousmonium Handbook (Book)
, 11 x 17 cm, 68 pages. Conceived and written by members of INA grm (Groupe de Recherches Musicales de l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), drawing on more than fifty years of experience in diffusing and presenting electroacoustic music in concert, the »Acousmonium Handbook« offers a synthetic exploration of the issues, techniques and methods applicable to acousmatic diffusion and sound spatialisation. As a manual, it provides numerous keys to designing a multiphonic sound diffusion system of …
Sub Re
Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things, Shifted in Dreams, and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg, co-composed with Akira Rabelais and Stephan Mathieu. With this major new album, entitled Sub Re, Bonnet continues his long exploration of the musical possibilities of sound, extending the concrete approach developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the historic and essential Parisian studio that Bonnet has been directing since 2018. Sub…
Zauberberg
"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 wand…
Spectres #05 – Diffusion
The fifth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, on the theme of diffusion and dissemination.
Fernweh
Visionary electroacoustic explorations return as Black Truffle reissues Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, a major work fusing musique concrète and synthesis into emotionally charged sonic landscapes of rare intensity.
Banshee / Basse Brevis
A split record in the Portraits GRM series. Davachi's Basse Brevis was co-commissioned by Radio France and INA GRM, and first played at the 2024 Presences festival, which was given over to Steve Reich.
ARITHW
François Bonnet, as Kassel Jaeger, at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2023: music from the 1906 Estey pipe organ, a grand piano and the acoustics of the former church.
Cylene II
Tip! The second round of Cylene, Bonnet & O’Malley’s collaboration initiated in 2018 and continued without interruption since then in a slow stream of concerts, installations and recordings. A presentation of tones and resonances where harmonic intersections elevate from the deep and scale up to the far firmament in careful motion, drawing emotions viscerally from the chest, giving rise to the suggestibility of the soul.
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 a…
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.…
Cylene Suisse Redux
Cylene Suisse Redux documents François J. Bonnet and Stephen O'Malley's Switzerland tour in December 2019, following the release of their first album, Cylene. The two musicians chose to entrust sound material recorded on the tour to the expert ears of two friends and great musicians Jim O'Rourke and Ryoji Ikeda, giving them carte blanche, and each in turn chose a distinct personal approach. For Ryoji Ikeda, it was a question of finding a moment, circumscribing a fragment of time through his list…
Vol Sombre - MMXX-13
Kassel Jaeger’s contribution to Matière Mémoire’s stunning MMXX Series, Vol Sombre (MMXX - 13), is a subtle expanse of delicate ambiences and long tones, meticulously constructed into an immersive sonorous world. Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies, on a single sided crystal-clear vinyl LP with a laser engraved artwork on the other, housed in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and containing an artist print by François Bonnet.
Meith
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 …
The Music to Come
A manifesto for possible future music. "This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as “music” is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But …
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. 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 …
Tacet #04: The Sounds of Utopia
*560 pages!* The sound arts and experimental music annual review's 4th issue, on the theme of utopias. Utopia belongs to those concepts that haunt both the history of ideas and the history of artistic practice. In this fourth issue,Tacetsets off to listen to the sounds of utopia emerging from sound art and experimental music, but also from sound design and our everyday use of sound technology. Mixing science-fiction short stories, theoretical analysis and artists' writings, this issue addresses…
In Cobalt Aura Sleeps
Second outing from Jaeger and O’Rourke following the release Wakes on Cerulean on Editions Mego in 2017.
Cylene
First time outing from two ardent explorers of peripheral sound tactics. Cylene is the first collaboration by François J. Bonnet (Kassel Jaeger) and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))). Laid bare we have a subtle and nuanced study of their individual practices forming a titanic whole. O’Malley’s guitar inscribes a void that patiently opens up a spacious universe for Bonnet to discreetly alter with perception re-orientating studio maneuvers. Cylene is infinitely rewarding for those that succumb to its …
Sound Before Meaning
This booklet is an attempt to employ incidental movements that are often overlooked or ignored, those winding conversations that inevitably occur between friends who share a passion for a common theme. Over the course of nearly a year, this conversation blossomed out of friendship among the participants. The three of us worked in different fields approaching avant-garde and experimental practice. Therefore, we believe that sharing aspects of these experiences and the conclusions they draw could …
Notes on Other Music
Notes on Other Music is a 112 page A5 perfect bound book published on the occasion of the Fourth Edition Festival for Other Music in Stockholm. The book collects photographs, essays, interviews and conversations relating to the festival programme since its inception in 2016.The book features an extended piece on Eliane Radigue by Kate Molleson who visited the composer at her Paris apartment to discuss her instrumental music ahead of the Swedish premiere of Occam Ocean — her work for orchestra pe…
Face Time
Face Time is the second release from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, and James Rushford, following on from their 2016 debut Pale Calling (BT 020LP). Recorded at the GRM studios in Paris in June 2017, the record immediately returns to the idiosyncratic sound-world of the trio's first release, a simmering stew of electronic smears, pitched-down animal moans, and mysteriously emotive microtonal organ chords. But before long the record takes an unexpected turn, as sounds that initially ent…
The Infra-World
If perception and language objectivate the world, if imagination structures it, if knowledge orders it, then how can we describe, name, or even apprehend that which comes to pass when language is absent, when perception vacillates, and when knowledge eludes us? How can we say, show, or make known that which undermines and refutes the order of things, the supposedly immutable real, and the administration of the sensible? This book takes us on a quest that traverses philosophy and the human scienc…
Aster
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 recentl…
Parallel / Grayscale
Parallel/Grayscale is the first collaborative work between Italian guitarist and composer Giuseppe Ielasi and French-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician Kassel Jaeger. It is comprised of two different improvisation sessions. The first one took place in Paris, in October of 2011. The second happened in Oreno, in June of 2012, after the first concert Ielasi and Jaeger performed together. The first session was a pure analog device improvisation, whereas the second one was more laptop-o…
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Onden
Spearhead of the Unfathomless series, retiring Kassel Jaeger comes back with a 3rd “electric” opus still renewing his own language without losing his singular touch…Onden, « hidden field »… a forgotten district in Tokyo. Only a shrine remains. From now on, hidden fields are everywhere around us, formed by electromagnetism. Onden is a wavering composition, interleaving two types of soundfields : the electromagnetic ones, produced by the numerous electrical devices of Shinjuku’s busy streets and t…
Wakes on Cerulean
Timely outing from two grand masters of exploratory electronics. Kassel Jaeger is the moniker of French musician François Bonnet who works at the GRM and has released a number of books including the highly regarded The Order Of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, published by Urbanomic in 2016. Jim O'Rourke is known to most through his explorations of the song and shapes, the high and low, the east and south. Wakes On Cerulean is a joint adventure where process folds upon process and the operation …
The Order of Sounds A Sonorous Archipelago
Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an ‘organ of fear’ and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual. In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of ‘sound’, navigating between the physical …
Pale Calling
**restocked** Pale Calling presents the fruits of the first collaboration between Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger and James Rushford, recorded at GRM studios, Paris in 2014. Although drawing on aspects of each member's solo works, the trio mark out their own unique territory, a mysterious space of slowly cycling electronics, distracted vocal mumbles and often unidentifiable field recordings. These two side-long pieces are composed of distinct layers that gently rise up and recede, obeying a dream-l…
Lignes D'Erre & Randons
Secrets. Hidden places. Unnamed memories. This is what is known of Kassel Jaeger ‘s Lignes d’erre & Randons. Furthermore, the name Kassel Jaeger itself is a fiction — a pseudonym employed by a Parisian composer who claims membership at GRM. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to make of that, or if I’m supposed to believe it. The composer teases with the notion that the source sounds for this electro-acoustic album originate from places that are important to Jaeger, whoever this person may be ; and…
Toxic Cosmopolitanism
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, …
Deltas
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 manipulat…
Algae
Restocked: Kassel Jaeger lives and works in Paris. He’s a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). ‘algae’ is the follow-up of ‘aerae’ (senufo edition # five) and continues the author’s research on possible intersections of instrumental improvisations and field recordings. Focused at the same time on microphone placement and elaboration of metastable sound states, ‘algae’ develops series of interlacing soundwaves which evolve like tidal movements and leave, here and there, inanimate o…
Aerae
**last copies** Kassel Jaeger lives and works in Paris. He’s a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) and his album is a weave of improvisations executed on various instruments (koto, rebab, positive organ, Coupigny modular synthesizer), captured and then treated as if they were field recordings. It’s about reducing the instrumental gesture to simple expressive material, shaping it while loosing control over it, letting it grow until there is no more readability in terms of ways of p…