Weaving a dense sonorous world from the materiality of electronics, organ, and field-recording, Meith, Kassel Jaeger’s latest LP with Black Truffle, reveals one of the most striking and ambitious artists currently working in the field of electroacoustic music. An absolutely beautiful joy in listening and a stunning slow burn.

Since first emerging during the mid 2000s, Kassel Jaeger - the once mysterious musical moniker of François Bonnet, the prolific writer and artistic director of the legendary Parisian collective and studio Groupe de Recherches Musicales - has become an unmistakable force on the French experimental and electroacoustic scene. Deeply invested in the potential of sound as an elemental form, he has carefully constructed a body of subtle, thoughtful, and meticulously constructed recordings that push at the boundaries of his chosen field. Jaeger is having an incredibly prolific moment. 2020 has already given us his brilliant collaboration with Jim O'Rourke, In Cobalt Aura Sleeps, as well as his recent double LP, Swamps / Things, issued by venerable Shelter Press, and two books published during this period under his given name, The Music to Come and After Death. As if that wasn’t enough, Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle imprint now brings us Meith, yet another stunning outing from Jaeger.

A single, long-form work divided into two parts, Meith encounters Jaeger departing further into the kind of murky, imagistic landscapes recently explored and developed by his last LP Swamps / Things. Meticulously crafted to reveal the intricate, writhing movement, flux, and detail within an almost static, drifting field, the album quickly reveals itself to be occupied, wherein harmonic material that first appears in one voice gradually expands into an entire arrangement, creating fleeting moments of unity amid the constant evolutions undergone by waves of tone and texture. Giving an illusion of formlessness, Meith undergoes a series of significant shifts across its duration, moving from the austere dissonance to surging harmonies, before the piece gradually dissolves into a spectral glimmer.

Immersive, organic and matter of fact, Meith appears almost as an amplifying lens for secondary ambiences that might be occupied daily, but that rarely receive the attention and value they deserve. A work that inspires, if not demands, repeated listening that pushes his idiom into a realm of deeply personal vibrancy and urgency that draws as much on underground approaches to experimental sound, kosmische, as it does rigorous traditions of academic electronic and electroacoustic music.