PRE-ORDER: Kassel Jaeger "Sub Re" LP

Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things (SP119), Shifted in Dreams (SP144), and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg (SP068), 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) and revitalizing it through an exposition that focuses less on the clear manifestation of sound material than on its ambiguous evocation.

Sub re, in Latin, can mean “under the thing, under the substance, under the matter.” It’s precisely this direct approach to music, drawing on the extraction of raw sound material, that forms the basis of this album. Under the matter thus signals the concrete aspect of music, but not the concrete that is transfigured, becoming vapor and form, the substrate of an idea. Rather, it signals the concrete beneath the concrete, in the immanence of sounds, in their becoming, as a driving force, like a tide, like a vault of imperious and powerful matter. To achieve this, Bonnet draws on a multitude of sound sources (acoustic, electronic, natural or artificial, created on purpose or found by chance) and a plurality of contexts and occasions to give them form.

The movement, a shell, a bell, a spell, for example, was heard for the first time during a concert organized in Venice in connection with Latifa Echakhch’s contribution to the Swiss Pavilion at the 2022 Art Biennale, while the last movement on the record, signalmirror, concluded a piece presented at the first Sound Biennale in Sion (Switzerland) in 2023. These elements, formed and detached from their original context of appearance, of the places and people who made them possible and listened to them, contribute to a complex layering of climates and sonic worlds and help create a contrasting album, where density and tenuity coexist in a succession of moving waves, sometimes laden with memories, sometimes filled with regrets, always set in motion by their own morphology.

Sub Re also refers to a chapter in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, a key passage in which the main character, faced with a colossal task, finds himself alone in the middle of the sea, beneath a gigantic shipwreck caught in the jaws of an isolated reef, surrounded by water, currents, and winds, alone to face the impossible. It is indeed beneath the surface that actions arise, decisions are made, and intuition guides us.