Encountering a maestro of the arts in full swing is always a strong experience for the perceptive connoisseur. I may be especially susceptible to inbound soundings this morning, after quite an extended bar round the night before with a consequent walk through a dark forest, but I do declare that this CD from the oeuvre of Bernard Parmegiani (b.1927) really hits home; opens up a hall of magical mirrors in my mind, between which my associations may bounce in a cross-fertilizing manner, all kinds of unexpected mirages appearing in transparence of pure musical intuition.

Parmegiani is one of the original knights of electroacoustics, poetic French style. He has produced in excess of 60 pieces, some of which are cornerstones of contemporary sound art. I was completely dumbstruck by works like De natura sonorum (1974 – 75) and Création du Monde (1982 – 84), but major pieces also emerged already in the 1960s.

Parmegiani’s background as a sound engineer and a mime has resulted in a peculiar sensitivity of artistic touch paired with the technical skill and knowledge of a scientist. His curiosity and restless creativity lead him into continuous experimentations and explorations of sound in diverse contexts.

The first entry on this CD is Capture éphémère from 1967, the oldest work presented. The booklet is quite detailed in its descriptions of the works. Each part gets its poetic attention in short texts by Parmegiani himself, and there is also an essay in the booklet by Jean-Christophe Thomas on the works provided, in both French and English.

Capture éphémère hits the enemy lines with dark thuds of sonic grenades, and the trajectories of the barrage can be followed as the wheezing sweeps past. High altitude jet engines may be heard soaring, as the fuselages of the bringers of sudden death gleam across the blue skies, out of anybody’s reach.

Or maybe this is a micro event, happening down in the layers of yesteryear’s leaves, heavily amplified through the senses of a German shepherd sifting through the moldering organics, hunting for small creatures of the Earth.

Parts of this music may also envision the air drawn into, and ejected through, the respiratory organs of an old boy on the farm, walking heavily through the outer perimeter of his dominions while the cilia of his trachea billow back and forth as his years are counted and recounted, his anatomic life measured and weighed, his existence ever more transparent.

The sounds are there, all of a sudden, fast gestures written in the sand, a jerky ballet across the horizon, a swarm of mosquitoes rising and descending against the red sun at nightfall in the south of France… a haywire henhouse flock of gallinaceous birds in hysteria… a reckless rock slide of moraine slopes in Lapland, the stream below glittering in the sun, glacier-water heading for the river in the midst of the valley as the world turns with all its loves and wars and deadweight of bodies strewn out across the curvature of the planet, in that thin blue layer of oxygen...

Microscopic sounds amass to a mighty flow of audio that builds an impression of a tour-de-force of a combination of organic matter and minerals, flesh and rock in a mangling movement of relentless power, unstoppable in its grainy grinding of matter, blood and soil in a mudflow of ages.

Capture éphémère is a wondrous achievement, when you realize the age of the work, perceived and realized as early as 1967. Had I heard it back then I wouldn’t have believed my ears. All the best ingredients of French electroacoustics are already present, and the sound is magnificent, the presentation heavily spatial and completely crammed with things to discover and explore. It’s not a one-spin track, but rather a work you return to many times. I am truly impressed by the awesome sonic creativity here!

Towards the end the sounds thin out into a bead of rippling audio, water-like, the sun reflecting in the thin and shallow stream of a mountain brook, and the silence of midday in the northern mountains of Lapland comforts the hiker…

Sons/jeu is a much later work, from 1987. When you begin to listen you might think it’s a reference to Schaeffer, because of the hasty ride down the railroad, and maybe it is, in part. The rhythmical pattern made up of short, fast repetitions of vocal phrases, piano chords etcetera hints at those very early piece from late 1940s and early 1950s. It’s an organized madness of sounds through the gracious hands of Bernard Parmegiani. Eventually he lands on a wheezing ssss at the end of a spoken word, extending the ssss into its own world of sounds, turning it, spiraling it, taking hold of that one second and holding it in a for-ever kind of grip between thumb and forefinger, in a godly gaze, stopping the linearity of time (if ever there was one), luring all kinds of sonorous aspects out of that caught-up moment at the end of a phrase, opening up large halls of tiny bells and silver mirrors with the applied manipulations, as the moment expands boundlessly, graciously offering the blessings of a summer’s meadow, grass and flowers and bees and a freshening breeze in a southern France pastoral.

The music that started on that ssss turns into a real landscape music, with birds and boiling clouds, and insects hover right in front of your face. The details are astonishing in this beautiful and dynamic sound painting.

Parmegiani talks about forgetting everything learned in the text for this piece; to just play with sounds – and he sure does play, but with the skill of a sound wizard who’s played before! I turn the volume up and stop worrying about neighbors; I got to hear this on a deafening level, because it is so uplifting, bringing me into unknown realms of existence, into a place of the essence of life and dreams! Unbelievable! Holy smoke! It’s ridiculous to try to describe this in words, so I’ll just resort to exclamation marks:!!!!!!!

The vocals return in whole words, parts of words, fractions of words and grains of words, then in the words of crowds and then in close-up whispers which turn into a fast boiling occurrence of watery havoc! See? It’s ancient graffiti on a wall unearthed in the desert, jumping at you like metal crabs with steel claws.

At long last the sounds amount to a desert storm full of cut-short thoughts and fragments of memories of parents and childhood.

Suddenly everything dies down into a refreshing silence in which water is at play in resounding droplets of an early morning forest pond with loons and mergansers, in an exuberant retort to the earlier sand storm inferno, slowly passing into a slightly altered state of electronic manipulations, the frogs transforming into a watchmaker’s clockwork, the little wheels and pendulums moving with microscopic clicks and whirrs! It’s a submarine watchmaker’s workshop overheard through hydrophones!

The slowly turning wheezing of white noise across the spectra leaves us with a high-altitude flyover by military jets propelled forth on white jet streams; gleaming needle heads of destruction driven by the bad Karma of a president oceans away…

La mémoire des sons is a late piece from 2001, written by a 74 years old hero of sonorities.
The title indicates remembrance, recollections, and perhaps the sounds presented are flakes of time blowing by in the whirlwinds of non-linear memory in which the elderly man breathes and staggers.
This is a peculiar static motion of encirclings, the mind turning in on itself, mirrored by itself in a thousand positions, as the mighty call of aroused crowds of the 1940s die down into church bells ringing in a picturesque vision of a small-town square, soon to dissolve into a threatening wind tugging at the tent at base camp, blue bodies strewn near the summit…
Beautiful modalities rise like soaring string orchestras in the midst of roaring, rumbling brutalities of humanity’s affinity for cruelty and war, like a god’s melancholy gaze into the hearts of evildoers…
Bamboo ripples on a wooden surface provides a grainy, hollow progression leading over into the transformed percussion of rain on tin plated roofs; full, fast sounds made up of myriads of components out of the craftsman’s sound palette, growing in intensity, the close, more violent sounds harder and more sparse than the backdrop of continuous hail.
It soon enters into a malevolent gush of mighty fluids, which, however, changes characteristics into a close-miked brook of glacial water, displaying as many timbres as there are colors playing on the surface of the shallow waters!
A deep drone appears in the sound of the brook, suddenly having you ride inside a World War II British bomber laboring across the channel towards Dresden genocides in February of 1945, fire storms soon to consume the civilians in one last lashing-out of allied revenge… but even this cruel image evolves into a spiritual mirroring of itself, elevated unto a thoughtful level of reconciliating bardo thoughts in the mind of someone close to enlightenment… and light seeps down through the spruce branches, lighting up a mossy rock in a meadow, around which elves and fairies move in weightless gestures of kind-hearted benevolence. We’re in a fairytale state older than age, younger than the not yet conceived… in a pure state of absolute mind, in elastically extending sounds of cart wheels and dark clouds of insects…

The secret forest harbors many beings, fluttering about, scrambling through the underbrush or climbing in spirals up the stems of giant trees. The presence of NOW is overpowering in this music of remembrance, and all times are now, all places here!

The steam whistles of saga ocean liners and giant mystical fog horns off the coast of the inhabited world mix into an eerie call for salvation out of the void of time which consumes the living…