This is an interview with François J. Bonnet. François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer, and theorist based in Paris. Since 2018, he has served as the director of the prestigious INA GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the French national research institution that has been a birthplace of electroacoustic experimentation since the 1950s. As a musician, Bonnet often works under the project name Kassel Jaeger, creating work that balances concrète experimentalism, ambient noise, and electroacoustic improvisation. He is also a prolific theorist and author, having published several books including The Music to Come (2020), After Death (2020), The Infra-World (2017), and The Order of Sounds (2016).
Bonnet’s music has been performed worldwide at renowned venues and festivals such as the Whitney Museum, the Venice Biennale, CTM, and Atonal. His recordings appear on labels like Editions Mego, Shelter Press, Black Truffle, and Drag City. He regularly collaborates with pioneering artists including Éliane Radigue, Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, and Jim O’Rourke. Beyond his compositional and directorial work, Bonnet is a producer for France Musique, co-editor of the SPECTRES publication series, and oversees the Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM record series.
DIFFRACTIONS: Can you reflect on any critical or formative auditory thresholds, environmental soundscapes, shared listening sessions or readings that were instrumental in your theoretical and artistic work?
François J. Bonnet: It’s always difficult to say. There are so many occurrences, cross-influences and lived experiences that come together, resonate and echo one another, and which contribute to a rather formless weave of influences. I would say, however, looking back a little, that it was often the dogmatic approaches I encountered during my education that led me to move away from the rules on the artistic side and to seek to analyze and question them on the theoretical front. So it was more about reactions than inspiration.
DIFF: You describe your music as a complex balance between different traditions. How do you see the role of an institution like the GRM evolving to foster this kind of hybridity, bridging the gap between the historical canon of musique concrète and the contemporary, often digitized, experimental landscape? How do you balance the weight of this history with the forward-looking imperative of your own work and the “music to come”? Is your role one of preservation, curation, or provocation – or all three?
FJB: Once again, these are vast and complex issues. I would say that one of the tasks I have set myself was to return to the roots of musique concrète in order to reconsider it as it is: a new musical approach – or, at the very least, a new method of making music. It was never a new musical style or genre with an established aesthetic and (once again) rules attached to it. Such aesthetic homogeneity was never part of Schaeffer’s agenda, and, actually, was never all that prominent within the GRM. It was rather certain observers and followers who subsequently sought to establish electroacoustic music as a musical genre, thereby playing into the hands of the detractors of this new music, who were well aware of its subversive potential.
There are therefore two ways of approaching this story: either to enshrine it, turn it into a museum piece and recite the catechism of a bygone era, or to start afresh from its roots, to ‘form a rhizome’, as Deleuze would say, and try to grasp and understand the active principles of musique concrète, its singularities, and build on Schaeffer’s intuition of a music that is ‘as general as possible’. And from there, to carry on the momentum, to extend this dynamic both by seeking new aesthetics that can be expressed through the concrète modality, and by continuing to explore the fundamental questions that musique concrète poses to music in general – questions which, for me, were a key driving force behind the reflections that led to The Music to Come. So, to answer the last question directly: yes, all three!
DIFF: You posit in The Order of Sounds, “The sonorous is without mark, it makes no territory but twists territory, contests it, refuses to condone its perenniality. Sound is a modulated, fugitive instance which is destined to disappear.” Is your work an attempt to activate this anti-territorial force or a sonic practice that twists territory and refuses its perenniality? Following your reference to Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” does this make your practice in a way conversational with a notion of politics? And if so, how do you define that politics here – or are you, in fact, moving beyond it, given that your refusal of territorial logic inherently challenges the foundational structures of musical institutional life?
FJB: Ah! I’m not trying to dodge the question, here, but let’s just say I don’t exactly frame it in those terms. My musical practice is, above all, driven by a research for freedom. This obviously involves setting aside as many preconceptions and rules – whether implicit or explicit – as possible and avoiding conforming to ‘canons’ (whether academic or simply current trends). Rancière writes, “Politics concerns what one sees and what one can say about it, who has the competence to see and the capacity to speak”; so, of course, participating by creating something perceptible is always political, but I would say that my music is not driven by a particular discourse. Of course, I develop discourses in my theoretical work, but I do not seek to make my music a ‘proof of concept’ for them.
And my music also acts independently of me; I do not have complete control over it; it ‘ex-ists’. So inevitably it is also political, in the sense that certain forces and powers assert themselves within the underground currents of the sensory. But it can be active, operative and powerful without necessarily being determined, shaped and organized by an author or actor who has complete control over it. To conclude, I would say that the institutional aspect is yet another layer. There are a thousand ways to navigate the institution, and often the aesthetic or artistic issues are not really the ones that are exposed or even under threat. The main issue at stake in an institutional existence lies in what I would call ‘legibility’.
DIFF: Your collaborations span vastly different musical worlds, from the meditative drones of Éliane Radigue to the heavy minimalism of Stephen O’Malley. What is the nature of the sonic dialogue in these projects? Is it a search for a common ground, or is it about creating productive frictions/interferences between your own sonic interests and that of your collaborators?
FJB: There are as many reasons as there are collaborations! Let’s just say that each one has allowed me to step into the world of extremely talented artists and broaden my understanding of the full range of possibilities in music. If we take the example of my longest-standing collaborations, each one reveals a different facet of that prism. With Éliane Radigue, it’s about being as loyal and faithful as possible to her vision of her music and to the way in which it should be shared. It’s a radical, demanding vision, but the more I play her works, the more I understand the validity and necessity of this demand, for it is music that reveals itself through the sustained experience of extremely attentive listening.
With Stephen O’Malley, it is the pleasure of live performance, of shared listening and the exploration of texture through extreme dynamics, harmonic interweaving and the sensation of music in statu nascendi. Finally, with an artist like Jim O’Rourke, I have been able to extend the electroacoustic experience with a collaborator who is an expert in the art of the studio and cybernetic approaches to music – one of the few musicians who possesses a panoramic approach to musical composition. I would say that the main thing these collaborations have in common – and this is no minor detail – is that it was, first and foremost, a bond of friendship that made them possible and brought them about. Never the other way round.
DIFF: Your book After Death diagnoses a condition of “anaesthesia” and “amnesia”. In this context, how do you see the deep, focused listening that your music demands functioning as a form of resistance? Can the act of patient, attentive listening be considered a type of different political orientation striving towards expanding or transforming our notion of attention, a way of re-engaging with time, finitude, and materiality in a culture that denies them?
FJB: I am not sure whether the terms ‘resistance’ and political’ are the most appropriate. In a way, they are – as we have seen above – if we stick to a ‘sensitive’ definition of the political. In any case, my work does indeed seek to create contexts, opportunities or conditions of possibility for an alternative experience of the world through listening and music. But here again, ‘alternative’ is perhaps an unfortunate term, as it would suggest a strict boundary between a social being completely trapped within their culture and a being-in-the-world entirely attuned to immediate perceptions. Admittedly, we are dealing here with nuances and gradations. Nevertheless, there are thresholds – thresholds beyond which one’s relationship with the world becomes apathetic, anaesthetized. The idea of music as a form of resistance might work if the resistance involved is mechanical rather than political – as if the experiences offered by this musical approach served to counteract the constant lowering of these anesthetic thresholds. But perhaps all of this is a little abstract…
DIFF: In your manifesto, The Music to Come, you write: “The music to come is inhuman, as it is not built around a ‘dialogue’.” Moreover, you contend that “The subject of music is not time, its expression, or its coordination with Man.” In fact, music has no subject. For a reader, it could suggests that music must be stripped of its human qualities: its expressiveness, its communicativeness, its dialogic structure. But can music be experienced by humans if it is inhuman? Is there a gap between the inhumanity of music and the humanity of the listener? And is the experience of the music to come, then, an experience of this gap?
FJB: The nuance I am trying to convey – though it is difficult – is that the music to come, as I understand it, is realized in the dissipation of Man… So we are neither dealing with music that exists solely as a dialogue and linguistic resonance between human beings, nor with a space that has been rendered void of humanity. In The Music to Come, I use this metaphor of gardens, ranging, to put it briefly, from a French-style garden—which opens up a dialogue between a vision and an architecture of the world, and a form of contemplation rooted in understanding—to an English-style garden, which seeks to evoke the idea of untamed nature. Of course, this is not without ambiguity… But here again, it is a matter of gradation and potentials rather than fixed statuses or stationary states. When I say ‘in the dissipation of Man’, Man is still there, but he fades into the background rather than asserting himself. Perhaps what is fading away is the ‘human, all too human’ aspect. Perhaps it is the ‘too’ that we are discarding – that of the overproduction of meaning…
DIFF: Would you have any further reflections on the manifesto as well? Has your thinking evolved, shifted, or been complicated by the years of practice and reflection that have followed? Are there things you wrote that you now see differently perhaps as too absolute or not radical enough?
FJB: I wrote it during a period of radicalism, and that was beneficial. Of course, there are things that need refining, discussing and clarifying. But that wasn’t really the book’s purpose. Its purpose was both to provoke a reaction and, hopefully, to inspire. I’m starting to think about a perhaps more structured way of approaching the issue, but maybe that will involve taking a roundabout route, moving away from music theory only to possibly return to it later in a more explicit way. I’ve been in great demand to write articles, give lectures or do interviews… But I feel the time is drawing near to get back to digging deeper…
DIFF: Further, much of your work as Kassel Jaeger is animated by encounters with the non-human: the sonic avatars of fauna, flora, and climate in Banshee; the swamp as a site of “our own disappearance, populated by all the beasts we have turned into” in Swamps / Things; the imperceptible sound that decentres the listener, dissolving the subject-object dialectic. These are not simply themes or representations – they are active forces that shape the music itself, how do you select or immerse yourself in these climates, environments or decide their influence in shaping your work?
FJB: It isn’t really a conscious or deliberate act. But it is indeed a constant: this immersion or connection with environments that break free from that ‘all-too-human’ aspect we’ve just mentioned. And I think it’s entirely accurate to speak of active forces that shape the music. So, to answer your question directly, with very few exceptions, it happens in a natural, contingent, arbitrary way. The only piece that is perhaps very methodically rooted in an environment – and which, incidentally, is a sort of exploration of that environment – is “Rituel de la Mort du Soleil”. Conversely, for example, “Swamps/Things” is a retrospective construction based on a vast number of on-site experiences over many years… There is also this depth of time that comes into play.
DIFF: Your latest work Sub Re refers to a number of things, notably a chapter in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea – a passage in which the protagonist, alone in the middle of the sea, faces a colossal shipwreck caught in the jaws of a reef, surrounded by currents and winds, alone to face the impossible. You write that “it is indeed beneath the surface that actions arise, decisions are made, and intuition guides us.” Is there a parallel between this solitary struggle and your own compositional process? Is making music, for you, a form of wrestling with the impossible – a confrontation with forces that exceed you?
FJB: Absolutely. It can take that form sometimes, but it can also be ‘softer’ and more fluid at other times. Sometimes, composing is a bit like sleepwalking, taking unknown paths, going with the flow, following the currents of sound. Sometimes it’s a struggle; sometimes it’s like following a river, or a flock of migratory birds drawn towards some sort of magnetic pole. There may be a slightly romantic notion in this image of the solitary artist facing the elements. And that image has been shattered by modernity. But if we set aside the egotistical figure of the Romantic genius, I think there is, within radical Romanticism, a fundamental element—one that precisely links humankind to a world that transcends it—an element that the avant-garde, saturated with progress, modernity and economic expansion, has sometimes overlooked.
DIFF: What else are you working on right now? Maybe not as a list of projects, but as a direction? Is there a question that is currently animating your practice, a problem you are trying to solve, a sound you are trying to reach? And what are you listening to not in the sense of influences or references, but in the sense of what is drawing your ear, what is calling you, what is resisting you? Has your listening changed over the years and if so, how?
FJB: This is the most difficult question of all. It calls for an answer that is either too long or too short. So, let’s go for short one. There are a multitude of things that question me, and a great deal of work still to be done to refine, expand and develop my practice and my reflections. As for listening… It is constantly evolving, and I would find it very difficult to treat it as a subject that I could observe, analyze and understand from an external perspective. I am my own listening.
REFERENCES
Books by François J. Bonnet:
Bonnet, F. J. (2020). The music to come. Shelter Press.
Bonnet, F. J. (2020). After death (A. Ireland & R. Mackay, Trans.). Urbanomic.
Bonnet, F. J. (2017). The infra-world (A. Ireland & R. Mackay, Trans.). Urbanomic.
Bonnet, F. J. (2016). The order of sounds: A sonorous archipelago (R. Mackay, Trans.). Urbanomic.
Musical Works (Kassel Jaeger):
Bonnet, F. J. [Kassel Jaeger]. (2025). Banshee [Album]. Portraits GRM.
Bonnet, F. J. [Kassel Jaeger]. (2020). Swamps / Things [Album]. Shelter Press.
Bonnet, F. J. [Kassel Jaeger]. (2013). Rituel de la mort du soleil [Album]. Unfathomless.
Bonnet, F. J. [Kassel Jaeger]. (2026). Sub Re [Album]. Shelter Press.
Literary Source:
Hugo, V. (1866). Les travailleurs de la mer [The toilers of the sea]. Verboeckhoven et Cie.
Theoretical Reference:
Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 2000)