RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 6, 2026
Conceived as a single continuous work, Géologie du Timbre by French composer, author and radio producer Alexandre Bazin unfolds as a long-form electroacoustic composition in eight movements, conceived within the format of a classical work.
Géologie du Timbre explores sound as a sensitive matter, a substance revealed as much through listening as through composition.
The work starts from the idea that timbre is not an attribute but a phenomenon, a shifting relief, a presence that transforms the moment one approaches it. Various sonic layers are set into motion, interacting, rubbing, and transforming one another, gradually unfolding an inner landscape.
Its dramaturgy evolves through micro-events, pressures, resonances, zones of density, and lines of flight, forming a cartography of the sensible in which sound reveals itself through transformation. In the tradition of major electroacoustic works emerging from the history of the GRM, Géologie du Timbre extends a radical attention to timbre, to materiality, and to what deep listening allows to surface. In this work, the ear functions as much as an instrument as the studio itself, and perception becomes the true site of composition.
The piece is built from a personal “sonothèque”, a library of sounds recorded specifically for this work at the GRM studios (Radio France), using a wide range of acoustic materials, resonant objects and friction-based instruments. Each sound was captured and developed through a process of close listening and electroacoustic transformation.
Another album by Alexandre Bazin will be released in November on Lawrence English’s label Room40. Spectre is about memory, evanescence, and transformation. As sources fade, listening shifts toward what they contain: their internal vibrations, resonances, and slow movements. OUT NOVEMBER 20
I. Cartographie d’une Tension
An extended electronic layer unfolds across the entire duration of the movement, forming a continuous timbral field. Percussive events, slowed down and transformed, inscribe themselves within it as punctual tensions, opposing this continuity. The whole is enriched by resonances of ocean drum and corrugaphone, which displace and thicken the material.The percussions reappear at the end of the movement, tightening the space before its closure.
II. Capture du Presque-Rien
The movement returns to a zone of instability, organized around an electronic center acting as a point of gravitation. Multiple objects collide with it, generating fleeting details, clicks, and spatial illusions. The song of the flexatone, unfolding in phrases, introduces an unstable line that captures and shifts attention. The movement closes on a concrete loop progressively transformed, until it merges with a synthetic material.
III. Matière Suspendue
A sustained sonic material is built over time from slowed sounds, creaks, and resonances of plates, springs, and metal sheets. The windsinger, bells, and hammered gongs extend and distort the timbre, establishing an unstable continuity. Rhythmic sequences emerge from stretched sounds, as if held back within their own development. The movement acts as a destabilizing factor for listening, blurring the nature of sources and disorienting perception.
IV. Silence Vibré
The movement refocuses listening on recognizable sources, bringing attention closer to the material itself. Ocean drum, rubbed bricks, crumpled aluminum foil, bells and vibrating plates, or a tam-tam rubbed by hand compose a concrete and immediate presence. These sounds are immersed in a shimmering electronic background, sustained over time like a harmonic pedal. The whole unfolds a continuous, warm space where timbre stretches and stabilizes.
V. Présence Mobile
The movement destabilizes listening through reversed sounds, close to white noise, difficult to identify, evoking altered and saturated breaths. This unstable material creates vertigo, a loss of reference points, keeping the listener alert. On a continuum of clicks, distant presences, almost vocal, appear and disappear.A world becomes perceptible behind a veil of noise, filtering and transforming perception.
VI. Ondes Stationnaires
Rubbed and slowed stones establish a granular material, sustained by a shimmering electronic pedal that holds attention. Around this center, rapid electroacoustic gestures, elastic figures, and multiple sound objects appear like satellites, disturbing this balance. The whole oscillates between peripheral agitation and central stability, in a twilight light. The movement ends in a halo that gradually dissolves, carried away by an accelerating friction.
VII. Géologie du Timbre
A full timbral continuum unfolds in space, opening a wide field of spatialization and breathing room for listening. The impression is that of a flight over, as if the sonic material could be approached, almost touched. A slowed sound persists, close to an animal breath or a rumble, like an underground mass in motion. The movement settles into a form of plenitude, extended and stable.
VIII. L’Ombre des Sons
Slow cycles organize themselves in rotation, like a mass orbiting around a maintained center. A high, mobile sound acts as a satellite, tracing unstable figures in space. Pure frequencies emerge like a core, refocusing listening while peripheral elements intensify. The movement gradually resolves, returning to a deep, almost amniotic presence, carried by the ocean drum.
