Bernard Donzel-Gargand (b.1955) is no stranger to the EAM community. He’s been around for a while, and I mostly remember him for his works on the Collectif & Cie / Ameg label and the Acteon label, where he released a few major works in the 1990s, like “Arcane 11”, “Chroniques” (that I playerd on my radio show in Sweden once) and “Coquillage” – all inventive and sophisticated events in the vivid splendor of sound art coming out of France. Nowadays Donzel-Gargand (whose name itself really sounds like an event out of a electroacoustic composition, the same way Jaap Blonk sounds like sound poetry!) runs his own studio – Studio Forum – in Annecy, where he also releases CDs. This CD, however, is issued by German label Plate Lunch, but all the pieces were recorded at Studio Forum.

The first piece is “Toile de sons” (1997); the title track. In English that would be “Web of Sounds”. In his poetic introduction Bernard Donzel-Gargand talks about “landscapes made of sounds, images without pictures” – and of course, this is what it’s all about. I like to compare electroacoustic music to abstract painting, or to the hideous mental landscapes of dreams, rising out of the subconscious.
This piece starts in a traditionally French style, with beautiful, yet eerie stretches of tones, rich in overtones, later to be succeeded by nature’s sounds of birds, thunder etcetera, and some kind of jolly brass orchestra, teaming up with conversing voices, taken over by thunder… Wow, this is musique concrète in the best meaning of the word! Nobody beats the French when it comes to musique concrète, and nobody has since Pierre Scaheffer started the darn thing! These Frenchies are Poets!

All four pieces on this CD are pretty extended. That is another quality that is common in French electroacoustics; they’re not scared of composing long pieces. Just contemplate for example some of the electronic masses that have come out of France, like Jacques Lejeune’s “Messe aux oiseaux” and Pierre Henry’s “Messe de Liverpool”, other electroacoustics with religious motifs, like Michel Chion’s “Requiem” and Xavier Garcia’s “Apocalypse”, plus other long electroacoustic works, like François Bayle’s “L’Expérience Acoustique”, Bernard Parmegiani’s “La Création du Monde”, Luc Ferrari’s “Presque rien” and Marc Favre’s “L’Illusion Acoustique”, to mention but a few. They are works of long duration, epic – but never boring, always enchanted, magic.

Bernard Donzel-Gargand’s works are between 16 and 20 minutes each, giving him ample time to develop his sonic solutions! When a gang of locusts team up with a folkloristic trumpet on a backdrop of murmuring mountain winds the day is made for this reviewer, and a bumblebee strengthens that feeling when it momentarily passes close by the microphone… It’s all about composition, of getting a decent tapestry together out of all these innumerable possibilities, and as always the true artist reveals himself in his way of discerning what is necessary for his ends, in the way he leaves things out, in his clever restraint. Donzel-Gargand discriminates cleverly, perhaps intuitively.
In “Toile de sons” he moves in and out of reality, in and out fantasy, from a concrete and well-known, familiar French countryside into an enchanted forest where the air is misty with a violet haze… He also moves from the world of humans to the world of our fellow life-travelers in animal guises… Magnificent!

“Rêves oubliés dans les yeux de Grigri” (“Forgotten Dreams in Grigri’s Eyes”) (1995) is the second entry. It’s a grainy, pulsating, erotic kind of sound world, reflected in the watery eye of a beloved lady, it seems… You’re actually traveling the cardio-vascular vessels of the beloved, rushing through the brain, where wild desires, wild thoughts, get charged with mental electricity, shooting through the nerve-ends, jumping transmitters and conveying the message to blushing cheeks and stiffening nipples… This love is of fairytale proportions, though, like the attraction between the little tin soldier and the ballerina in Donovan’s song… The touches are light, the fingertips dance lightly across the other one’s face…

“Légende du Pont d’Yeu” (“The Legend of Pont d’Yeu”) (1999) begins in the concrete mood of the first piece on the CD, when people are walking, talking, probably on some kind of outing, the Mediterranean way, with a basket of wine, bread and fruit… but the magic of electroacoustics sweep you up in a dreamy feel, moving you across water surfaces and forgotten lives that you’ve grown through in earlier guises of the spirit – and you’re back in the spirit! A guiding voice in French talks real close, so close you feel you have to obey, in a hypnosis of trance-like intent… There is an old legend concerning Pont d’Yeu and the devil making a deal with Saint Martin of Vertou, and Donzel-Gargand composed this music in that atmosphere.

“Mise en ciel d’un Scarabée” (“Set in the sky by a scarab” (1995) takes care of the last 17 minutes of the CD. Donzel-Gargand’s introduction talks about the holy scarab (in China and Egypt), being a symbol of the night-and-day cycle. It has to do with rising from the dead and living again, re-birth upon re-birth upon re-birth. The ball of excrements and mud symbolizes the egg and the Earth.
The music is scanning the environment in slow sweeping gestures, feeling what is there, whether evil or good, or worse; ignorant and uncurious. Donzel-Gargand is moving in the vein of philosophers as well as musicians and artists. That is oftentimes the case with dedicated composers of alien sounds. It comes natural. There is so much hidden, hinted meaning in these sounds, behind these sounds, which reach you out of the core of matter, which is also the core of spirit – just two aspects of the same life-giving principle, vibrating throughout the Universe, throughout the sounds…

Bernard Donzel-Gargand is a good name for one of these wizards of electronic devices, making machinery generate vibrations in the tone of life, death and hereafter!