condition (record/cover): NM / NM - Gatefold sleeve. Alain Savouret emerges from the GRM laboratory like a botanical surgeon of sound, and L'arbre Et Caetera stands as his most eloquent specimen. There's something profoundly unconventional in how this record refuses to explain itself: the tree of the title isn't some airy metaphor—it's a load-bearing structure, a system of sonic ramifications that Savouret grafts, prunes, and lets grow wild.
We're in 1982, and INA-GRM releases this LP at a moment when French electroacoustic music has already birthed its sacred monsters. Yet Savouret doesn't genuflect before the founding fathers. He studied under Pierre Schaeffer himself, absorbed the lessons of François Bayle's acousmatic cinema, but bends their vocabulary toward something more organic, almost respiratory. Where Schaeffer dissected, Savouret cultivates. Where Bayle painted vast imaginary landscapes, Savouret tends a single garden with obsessive care.
The record proceeds through accumulations and rarefactions, following a logic closer to vegetal growth than Hegelian dialectics. While so many Schaeffer epigones treated magnetic tape like a scalpel, Savouret wields it like a watering can. There's patience in this music, a certain faith in long duration that recalls Éliane Radigue's glacial drift—though Savouret remains tethered to the concrete, to the crunch and rustle of actual matter.
A work deserving rediscovery, not for archaeological reasons, but because it sounds strangely prophetic today: that sensitivity to sound as ecosystem, to texture as habitat, is precisely what much contemporary electronic music is laboriously relearning.
