Arsène Souffriau

condition (records/box): M / NM

Insert included.

A buried cornerstone of Belgian experimental music, now documented with the care it deserves. Arsène Souffriau (born Brussels, 1926) belongs to the first generation of Belgian electronic and musique concrète composers - alongside Henri Pousseur, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Leo Küpper - yet has remained, until recently, its least acknowledged member. The reason is partly circumstantial: where his contemporaries gained institutional footholds and international visibility, Souffriau worked in near-total independence, sustaining a career as conductor, sound engineer, and functional composer for film, theatre, and documentary while pursuing his experimental work in the solitude of his private studio.

That studio - BIMES, Bureau d'Illustrations Musicales, Electroniques et Sonores - was established in 1959, the year after Souffriau encountered Pierre Schaeffer at the Brussels World Exhibition and began his first experiments alongside Pousseur and Küpper at the APELAC studio in Brussels. Everything on this 3LP box, issued by Metaphon in a limited edition of 200 copies with a 40-page booklet, was drawn from Souffriau's private archive - works spanning nearly four decades that have never, until now, been released.

The arc is remarkable: from the primitive concrete tape music of the early 1960s - the Trois Études pour Maldoror of 1962, the Feu d'Artifice of 1963 - through the analogue group improvisation of the Groupe Fusion period, into the digital and MIDI explorations of the 1980s and '90s. The span is not stylistic inconsistency - it is the record of a restless, independent intelligence working outside any scene, following the material wherever it led. A document of four decades of solitary invention. Metaphon 002, 2010. Essential.