Tomorrow, the London contemporary music festival – which is rapidly establishing itself as the capital’s most adventurous and ambitious festival of new music, takes over Second Home, a former carpet factory in Shoreditch, for something genuinely visionary: a celebration of the creative career of French composer Bernard Parmegiani, who died at the age of 86 last year. After its wildly diverse season in a car park in Peckham last summer, the LCMF’s four-day focus on a pioneering composer whose work (mostly, but not all, electro-acoustic) is not known enough in this country is brave and bold.

In a way, that’s no surprise in, since Parmegiani’s influence as a sonic adventurer goes way beyond the conventional confines of the classical. Aphex Twin, Autechre, Sonic Youth all count him as a guru thanks to the prophetically imaginative ways he was manipulating tape, electronics, sound recordings and sampling, way before “sampling“ even had a name (listen to Parmegiani’s Pop Eclectic on YouTube to hear what I Mean – “fucking genius”, as one commentator puts it, just about sums it up: in its creative plundering of everything from pop to classical, and it sonic smearing of everything in between, it sounds like something from a much later period of experimentation and technological possibility - but this is 1968… amazing).

But Parmegiani deserves a wider reputation alongside Stockhausen, Xenakis or Cage in terms of the range and achievement of his work. Spread across the four days, with performances and diffusions of a representative range of Parmegiani’s oeuvre, as well as live sets from musicians who been influenced by him – Rashad Becker, Vessel, Florian Hecker – the LCMF will create a journey of discovery into Parmegiani’s works for tape and for film, music composed over 40 years from Danse, written in 1961, to Espèces d’éspace, from 2002. There’s also a new film for Parmegiani’s 1970 The Listening Eye from Daniel Bird, the chance to hear the gigantic and the – genuinely-not-just-metaphorically – cosmic La création du monde, a 73-minute electro-acoustic masterpiece diffused by composers and colleagues close to Parmegiani and his music, and violinist Aisha Orazbayeva will play the weekend’s only instrumental work, Violostries for violin and tape.

And even if you don’t think you know Parmegiani’s music, if you travelled to Paris by plane from any time from 1971 until 2005, there’s a good chance you actually do: he composed the world’s best ever “jingle” – far too demotic a term for what is a micro-masterpiece of electronic music – for Charles de Gaulle airport.



Why they discontinued it is a mystery: in three seconds, Parmegiani distils the magic and mystery of jet-travel, and calls your attention to a flight you’re just about to miss, too. If his music can do that in a few seconds, imagine what his music will do over four days? Get to LCMF this weekend and find out.