There’s something quietly fascinating about 'L’arbre Et Caetera', by Alain Savouret. It’s one of those records that feels less like an “album” and more like a document from a very specific moment when sound itself was being rethought from the ground up.
Savouret, born in 1942 in Le Mans, belongs to that generation of French composers who came up inside the orbit of experimental institutions rather than traditional bands or orchestras. He worked closely with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), a place where composition meant cutting tape, sculpting noise, and exploring how recorded sound could behave once freed from instruments. His work tends to sit somewhere between playful and analytical, often mixing structured forms with a kind of surreal sonic storytelling.
This album, released in 1978 on INA-GRM, gathers pieces that were actually composed earlier in the 1970–72 period, which already tells you something: this wasn’t about chasing trends, but about archiving and circulating works created in the studio lab environment. The main piece, “L’arbre Et Caetera,” runs over 15 minutes and plays with a rondo-like structure, alternating recurring fragments with more freeform sections. What’s striking is how it uses layers of “concrete” sounds -recordings manipulated on tape-sometimes shifting between mono, stereo, and even early quadraphonic spatial ideas, which was pretty adventurous for the time.
The label behind it deserves as much attention as the music. INA had absorbed the GRM in 1975, and soon after started putting out records under the INA-GRM imprint. These releases were never mainstream in the usual sense; they were more like dispatches from a research lab. The GRM itself goes back to the late 1940s, when Pierre Schaeffer began experimenting with recorded sound as raw material, essentially inventing musique concrète. By the time Savouret’s LP came out, the studios had evolved into a hub with custom gear, tape machines, and early electronic tools, attracting composers who treated sound like something to dissect and reassemble.
So when you put on 'L’arbre Et Caetera', you’re not just hearing a composition, you’re hearing a slice of that whole ecosystem. The edits, the abrupt shifts, the almost tactile quality of the sounds all point back to hands-on tape work. It’s experimental, sure, but not in a cold or academic way. There’s a strange sense of humor in how fragments repeat and mutate, like objects being turned around to catch the light differently each time.
Label:
INA-GRM – AM 647.07
Series:
Collection GRM
Format:
Vinyl, LP, Album
Country:
France
Released:
1978
Style:
Musique Concrète, Contemporary, Experimental, Electroacoustic, Modern Classical, Tape Music
Tracklist:
A1 L'arbre Et Caetera 15:42
Selon
A2 1er Tiers-Temps Variations 1 À 6 7:00
B1 1er Tiers-Temps Variation 7 3:00
B2 2ème Et 3ème Tiers-Temps 18:04
Notes:
"L'arbre Et Caetera" for tape realized at studio 52 of Groupe de recherches musicales de l'ORTF.
Premiered August 2, 1972 at Cloître des Célestins during the 26th Festival d'Avignon as a tetraphonic work.
The version of "L'arbre Et Caetera" presented here is the stereophonic reduced version.
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