A cornerstone of the acousmatic tradition, finally on vinyl. François Bayle's Jeîta ou Murmure des Eaux arrives as a limited LP via Recollection GRM and Shelter Press - one of the composer's most singular and spatially ambitious works, composed in the wake of a concert given at the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon in 1969, where Bayle had traveled to mark the opening of the cave's newly discovered upper gallery. Bayle joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1960, studying under Pierre Schaeffer and later directing the INA-GRM for two decades - the period during which he designed the Acousmonium (1974), launched the GRM record label, and refined the theoretical and practical foundations of acousmatic music. More than any of his peers, it was Bayle who insisted that the listening subject - invisible, interior, always implied - sits at the very centre of the electroacoustic work. Jeîta is perhaps his clearest argument for that position.
The cave is everything here: a physical site from which Bayle drew recordings of water, stone, and resonating air, and a mental architecture within which those raw materials undergo transformation. The sounds he captured in the Jeita Grotto - dripping water, fossilised resonances, the low hum of enclosed space - are fed through the synthesizers at GRM and returned as something unrecognisable yet entirely plausible. Water becomes stone, stone becomes voice, voice dissolves back into water. The seventeen tracks - from "cloches fossiles" and "murmure des abeilles de pierre" to the three successive "murmure des eaux" - form a single continuous body rather than a sequence of discrete pieces: a topography, not a playlist. Running through the work is a figure Bayle draws from Paul Klee - the fluid, multiple inhabitant of the cave, the "Man-Animal" with a "Clock of Blood" in place of a heart. It is an image that captures the experience of listening to Jeîta precisely: the sense of an internal, pulsing presence that shifts form without ever resolving into fixity. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin. Layout by Stephen O'Malley.
• LP housed in printed inner and outersleeve
• Embossed outer sleeve
• First pressing of 1000 copies
