Didier Bonin - L'air Lumiere 1982 (Private Pressing) {Bonus, Arbre-Verre 1979}

From French rock discography:
"This is the versatile musician, guitarist and keyboardist Didier BONIN's first [act. second] production on which he offers a refined, suggestive, very beautiful and melodious music inviting the listener to dream and travel. The delicate chords of the acoustic guitar combine and mix with the gentle, flowing, spatial sounds of the keyboards to create a poetic, romantic and impressionist universe. "

I find very little information about this artist online, which is odd because the sheer professionalism of the playing and songwriting is astounding. Bonin's work sounds very much like french masterpiece Michel Moulinie's Chrysalide (for those familiar with it) or less so perhaps Claude Perraudin's Mutation 24. We have the very atmospheric 12-string acoustics with sustained and reverbed electric guitar melodies, all instrumentals, occasional use of synthesizers but mostly with delicate arpeggiated guitarwork front and centre. Because of the guitars I wouldn't describe this as electronic, though it has the 'mood' of electronic music i.e. introspective and thoughtful. There is that typically french melancholia and exquisite delicatesse in the music, such as you hear in for ex. Yves and Alain Lorentz Espaces and a lot of French library music e.g. Serge Bulot. Some of the songs feature dropped-D tuning to give that particularly droning sound to the chords. A lot of tritones as usual in progressive. Check out the insane chord progression in the song "Ecumes" (sea-foam) where D minor passes to G minor, but then suddenly ends in G7 (major) in the second part of the intro melody. Wow! That's what makes this kind of music so incredibly interesting to listen to. Bizarrely I'm reminded of the Smashing Pumpkin's Pisces Iscariot which had a couple of songs that had the same acoustic strumming with soft echoed electric guitar melody on top.

An amazing song called "Silences" features speaking at the start-- I could swear David Lynch copied this "Silenzio" for his brilliant movie Mulholland Drive where two-thirds through we have the abrupt switch from dreamland to horrible world of reality. However, the chance of him having heard Didier Bonin is surely zero. The sound of the synths in this track and the last one has that typical seventies intergalactic sound.

He made two albums, one in 1979 (Arbre-verre, glass tree) and one in the early eighties (Air-lumiere, or light-air), confusingly, two tracks from the latter appear on side one of the former, the aforementioned Ecume and Air-lumiere. Is it a case of self-plagiarism or self-homage? I don't know, I don't have the original vinyls to check, hopefully someone can enlighten us here without getting angry and confrontational in the process. The second side is distinctly inferior to the first, although it ends surprisingly in a classically dramatic D major suggesting to me the artist was classically trained in composition. I do feel this music is far too beautiful to be abandoned by the wayside in the cultural heritage of humanity. I hope I'm not the only one to believe this.

Ecumes...
Silences...