Christian Zanési’s electroacoustics are of a shorts-and-T-shirt type, a southern sky audio, with an intellectual faiblesse up the sleeve. Here’s a musical J. M. G. Le Clézio, walking through the outskirts of the city, reading messages off of scrap papers in the gutter, shaping a story of the moment in the moment, with an overwhelming history of events leading up to that instant, that moment, along the chain of causality, along the compass courses of Karma, immediately connecting to the touch stones of the future, zigzagging like lightning into an opening space-time-continuum of coming events. He’s a real hellhound of sorts.

I first laid ears on Zanési on his “Stop! L’horizon”-CD on INA C 2001 (1990), and that was a revelation to me. What wondrous soundscapes this boy could convey. With a good sub-woofer connected, that piece is sure to bounce you hard! The next CD by Zanési I discovered was “Grand bruit” on the glorious Metamkine label, run by Jérôme Noetinger in France, who also is one of the most indispensable distributors of new music. The latest Zanési find is “Le paradoxe de la femme-poisson” on INA K 198. Of course, Zanési was also represented on INA-GRM’s first CD, the by now famous “Concert Imaginaire” on INA C 1000 (1984). His part there was “D’un jardin à l’autre”.

In the booklet to “Stop! L’horizon” he is characterized like this; “Christian Zanési is a pure studio composer, a sound sculptor. His music, which is inscribed and elaborated in the stereophonic environment aims at establishing via loudspeakers a physical connection with the listener, that vibrant organic being”. Right on the money!

On this CD – “Arkheion” – Zanési pays tribute to two giants of the 20th Century; Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer. Here he lets Stockhausen’s voice appear in a musique concrète setting, with all kinds of beeps and swelling vibrations serving as an intro to this collage-like venture, even letting Stockhausen utter the very words “collage” and “musique concrète” at the outset. The name Stockhausen is so loaded with meaning, with a certain kind of symbolism, and with the respect one must have for a person that has meant so much for the evolution of modern music in the Western world, that this electroacoustic piece takes on a heaviness of historic relevance. The words of Stockhausen are sampled from an archive tape from the vaults of INA, and he speaks in French. However, Stockhausen’s voice is just one of the sound elements in this very exciting piece, with that Le Clézio quality I mentioned before – that Mediterranean intellectual and a bit fatalistic nuance. A young woman’s complementary voice pairs up with the soft force of Stockhausen’s words, and the electronic permutations bend the progression of utterances out of shape.

The second part deals with the inventor of musique concrète himself, the mighty Pierre Schaeffer. Naturally this is a concrete piece by its nature, and with beautiful permutations of the voice, not without some good old French humor here and there, and of course the track doesn’t lack train whistles! All the while this is Zanési’s piece, though, with that certain southern feel, and with the extra spice that he always adds to his works, making them more adventurous than the average electroacoustic work. Exciting!