Kassel Jaeger: Sub Re (digital, Shelter Press, July 2026)

This is a fascinating work from Kassel Jaeger, aka GRM head-honcho François J Bonnet. It starts out with a big fuzzy ambient woomph, which fades a bit into the background, and is then joined by a workout on what sounds like maybe tubular bells, which then continue as we move into a slightly more melodic section, first stringy synths, then some guitar, and it builds again… only to fade into a kind of concrete oscillator space… and we’re still not halfway through the first of the two twenty-minute tracks here. Handled badly, this approach can feel fidgety or episodic, but here he somehow manages to give the impression of a coherent narrative weaving its way through. (It reminds me a little bit of Robin Rimbaud’s soundtrack for Hans Op de Beeck’s Staging Silence in that way.) I’ve been listening to this album on-and-off for a few weeks now, and it’s a hard one to wrap my head around: sometimes, if I haven’t heard it for a while, I find myself thinking: “I remember that I liked that, but I can’t remember why”. So then I have to go listen to it, and… yes, of course, that’s it! There are so many transcendent moments, like the epic swell that kicks in towards the end of Part I, and the wide-open sine-waves and field-recording soundscape around the middle of Part II, and… If you want to know what the title means and what it signifies, I recommend you go check out the blurb on the bandcamp page. If you want to immerse yourself in some truly sublime and inspiring music, I recommend you lie back and get this in your headphones.

I bought this from the artist’s bandcamp page.