Paysages Planétaires on Alga Marghen may be the great unrecognized masterpiece of ethno-electroacoustic music, a 3CD box that arrived in 2004 with almost no fanfare and has waited two decades for ears ready to hear it. Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, collaborators across forty years and more than twenty works, here achieve something that resonates uncannily with Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's "Fourth World" concept. Yet Pousseur, the serialist pioneer who worked alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio in the 1950s, arrived at this territory from an entirely different direction.
The project originated in 2000 when Brussels architect Philippe Samyn invited Pousseur to create an electronic carillon for a business complex in Nivelles. From this modest commission, Pousseur expanded into something visionary: sixteen "planetary landscapes" that fuse ethno-musical samples from across the globe with digital processing, layered over perpetually evolving environmental sounds (sea, fire, city, swamp, industry, forest). The titles announce the method through linguistic fusion: "Alaskamazonie," "Gamelan Celtibère," "Andes Afro-Nippones," "Éthiopie Brésilienne," "Vietnamibie," "Canadacathay." Each landscape superimposes regions, traditions, temporalities, creating imaginary geographies where Indonesian gamelan meets Celtic drone, where Saharan shamanism encounters Japanese texture.
What astonishes, listening now, is how completely Pousseur anticipated the global-electronic synthesis that would become commonplace only years later. This isn't world music as touristic sampling; it's genuine hybridization, traditions digested and recombined into organisms that belong to no single place yet honor all their sources. The nearly four hours unfold as mutable soundscapes meshing with aplomb, what one listener called "an apotheosis of genres and crossovers." Realized at Studio Crossed Lines with his son Denis Pousseur, the digital treatments vary the recognizability of source materials from quasi-traditional to utterly transformed, keeping the ear perpetually uncertain, perpetually engaged.
Butor's luminous prose-verse poetry accompanies the procession, his text included in the sixty-page booklet alongside Pousseur's essays detailing atmospheric and cultural sources for each landscape. The documentation transforms the box into scholarly object, but the music needs no explanation: it simply envelops, transports, astonishes. That this work remains largely unknown while lesser achievements circulate widely is one of contemporary music's stranger oversights. Alga Marghen's heavy cardboard slipcase houses a secret masterpiece.
