François J. Bonnet: The Music to Come (Shelter Press)

Bonnet’s first books via Urbanomic (The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago [2016] and The Infra-World [2017]) offered incisive multi-disciplinary investigations of sound. Moving between philosophy, ancient myth, cultural studies, cinema and the visual arts, these texts consider the perception (and poetics) of sound and how ideas about listening have evolved through history. At its core, however, Bonnet’s work remains interested in what slips beneath the senses.

From the one-sheet:

“This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as ‘music’ is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But the sole concern of the following text will be to make this statement legible, understandable, and perhaps even to some extent acceptable. Its hope is that, setting out from a few intuitions, the possibility of a music to come can be formulated. That this obscure becoming will emerge, one trait at a time; that the shape of this music to come will reveal itself, gradually, by way of a cluster of assumptions, the reading of a multiple history, and the examination of damaging paradigms that have taken music far from itself. That the subjectivity of a writing, with all of its beliefs, its errors, its biases, its injustices and its shaky certainties, may yet manage to cast a singular and inspiring light upon the idea of music.”

* François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theorist based in Paris. He's the Director of INA GRM and also produces shows for national radio France Musique. His music, often released under the Kassel Jaeger project name, has been presented worldwide.

**Our in-house label Future Audio Graphics commissioned an essay in collaboration with Anne Guthrie and Virginia Overton entitled Sculpture Gardens.