BERNARD PARMEGIANI レコード& CD

Review: This album from Bernard Parmegiani, a pioneering French composer and key figure in electroacoustic and musique concrete, finally gets a full issue from humble origins as a 1992 radio braodcast and then a CDR-only release in 1994. Though this collection is part of fellow Frenchman and film director Emmanuel Raquin-Lorenzi's larger Lac Noir project - an expansive multimedia work inspired by a mythical Transylvanian 'snake-woman' - every piece here is entirely Parmegiani's own. Across nine tracks, he sculpts vivid, shape-shifting environments where texture and motion take precedence over conventional melody. 'La Traversee' and 'Le Cercle' unravel with an organic fluidity, while 'Tsiganie' and 'Rouge Et Blanc' introduce fragmented rhythms that pulse beneath layers of manipulated sound. A pioneer of musique concrete, Parmegiani's work has left a lasting imprint on artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, and here, his command of electroacoustic space remains as striking as ever-an intricate, deeply immersive listen that continues to influence generations of experimentalists.

Review: Swiss label WRWTFWW has scored something of a coup here, securing the rights to release two near mythical film soundtracks by legendary experimentalist composer and music concrete artist Bernard Parmegiani. The soundtracks themselves were originally composed for a pair of experimental films (1972's "Les Soleils de L'Ike de Paque" and 1965's "La Brulure de Mille Soleils") whose hallucinatory approach to cinematography offered Parmegiani a chance to let his imagination run wild. The results are predictably out-there and inspired, sitting somewhere between the Radiophonic Workshop, Stockhausen and the cutting-edge pioneering electronica of American composer Morton Subotnick.