Kassel Jaeger, Meith, Australia, Black Truffle, BT069 vinyl LP (2020)
A single track in two parts spread over a vinyl LP, Kassel Jaeger’s “Meith” is a gorgeous and soothing work of delicate undulating electronic drone and noise. It seems at once static, hardly going anywhere, and yet it’s in constant movement; it initially seems very slow but the details of the track are actually very busy and move quickly; and while almost completely electronic or electro-acoustic, it gives the impression of being quite a warm, even welcoming organic entity. Repeated hearings will reveal an inherent order within what seems to be a formless amoeba-like composition. The later part of the recording is very spell-binding and fascinating as sounds appear to be expanding across the infinite reaches of this particular universe from a central core in a stately centrifugal stream, though individual particles themselves are moving quickly and fragments of melody rise and fall in a matter of second within this stream.
Kassel Jaeger is the project name used by François Bonnet, based in Paris, who has collaborated with artists such Oren Ambarchi whose label Black Truffle released “Meith” last year, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke, Akira Rabelais and James Rushford. As well as composing and performing music, Bonnet is the current director of Director of Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA-GRM) in Paris, a producer on National French Radio France Musique, and is a writer and theoretician who has had books published in English by The MIT Press and Urbanomic.
I really ought to pay more attention too, to a label whose resident chef’s secret for finding black truffles requires little more than using a dowsing stick while facing in the direction of the sun. Sunglasses are probably optional.