In an attempt to go beyond the desire to celebrate man in music, François-Bernard Mâche incorporates into his works the raw sounds of the sea, wind and fire, as well as the gestures of the instrumentalists. It's not so much a question of taming or evoking elemental voices or taming them, but of blending in with them.... [he] celebrates a kind of materialist pantheism. 

François-Bernard Mâche's concept of the sacred in music approaches one of the major African thoughts on the subject. 
In his interview with Domitille Roy, the composer reveals his secret when he admits that he believes that the function of music is "to seek a sonic accord with the universe. It's the old magic role that music has always had, and that hasn't changed fundamentally since it was  performed in concert halls. Because successful music is a profound contact with the world; it's a magical operation; otherwise it remains an entertainment, a living-room trinket, and that's as far as it goes. [He clarifies this by adding that he believes] that music and the arts in general respond better than religions today to the sense of the sacred, if by this we mean the sense of solidarity between man and the universe. Instead of setting us apart, music unites us with the world, and first and foremost with the world of noise that surrounds us. He is looking for something in music that is an immediate expression, the opposite of language, something that touches the unconscious levels of the personality. 

The composer thus believes in an art of sound that assumes some of the functions that religion fulfils for some people, or used to fulfil for most people. That this art performs this function of questioning the world and bringing into play, not only intellectual qualities, but everything that makes up the human spirit and personality, including the very important physical, bodily component. It is in this sense that the category of the sacred interests him, but not religion as a social institution. His religion, he says, "dispenses even with the idea of God". He explains: "It's simply - and this is what fascinates me - the search for universal laws through music. This search can be done through the elements of nature and the senses, a bit like the painters of Leonardo da Vinci's time, who stared at a wall until fascination caused unconscious images to emerge through the blurred lines. It's a practicable method for sound". 

The myth exploited by Mâche is not primarily this tradition linked to a given historical culture, but the spontaneous direct expression of nature in culture. For him, nature is "that which is given": a bird's song or the sound of the sea or the noise of machinery, for example. This acoustic world, from which he hears various sound objects, enables him to create his own sound matter, through the organisational relationship between the fruits of his senses or consciousness and those of what is given, what is around him. 

 (Cf. the chapter "Plaisir du son" in François-Bernard Mâche, Entre l'observatoire et l'atelier, 1, Paris, 1998, pp. 18-19. )

Among his compositions with a sacred essence, in the sense that he intends to attribute to this term, is Kemit (1970). This work is not folk entertainment, but music with the same spiritual significance as, in Mâche's own words, that of Johann Sebastian Bach or Xenakis. Through his musical writing, the composer has dared to give it a second life. In so doing, he reveals one of the last echoes of a great civilisation that arguably predates the Muslim contribution to Nubia. 
Much traditional African music can be likened to incidental music, in which the aim is not to portray the feelings of characters, but to "communicate the meaning of the performance". F.-B. Mâche was particularly interested in the hidden meaning of what is said and played on stage, in other words, the meaning of the action and what goes beyond words and mechanical gestures. The same is true of Jean-Louis Florentz.
 Mâche's Traversée de l'Afrique (1985) was written in this spirit.The resulting incidental music is a kind of "voice-over revealing the secret motivations behind what is happening, or commenting from a distance". The music represents European teenagers of African origin dreaming of a mythical Africa. 
In Rituel de l'oubli (1969), the melodies of various species of birds reveal characteristics similar to human music, in one technique or another of variation, ornamentation or repetition. The importance of this fact in African music, where man, nature and animal are mysteriously united in a complex relationship of exchange, must be emphasised. Man uses musical sounds to address a tree or an animal, for example, in order to convey a message to it in the same way as to a human being. In African thought, nature is conscious, and animals can express themselves in the same way as humans. Consequently, the establishment of a dialogue between man, nature and animals is a necessity that takes place through a common primordial language, music. 

 The composer explains his concept on this subject: "You can let yourself be hypnotised, for example, in extremely noisy places, and in this particular state of consciousness, remarkable sound phenomena can emerge. The difficulty then lies in recovering and fixing them. Halfway between what is given by perception and what is imagined, there is a possible method of access to bring out these mythical aspects. It's a risky method, as we saw with Rimbaud and Surrealism in the field of poetry. You have to practise under the control of a solid profession and a vigilant critical sense, without which you run the risk of sacralising pure babble. But in today's confusion of cultural values, it's a possible Ariadne's thread. From the retreat of the Minotaur to the sun of Crete, music gropes its way. Archetypes and sensations give it a few forms between which it looks for links, just as mythological discourse looks for links between hallucinations. The Greeks said it in four words: 'Up, down, one way'. Op. cit. pp. 43-44. 

Music thus remains an activity that transcends the human species. The African traditionalist  becomes sensitive to the natural sound environment and attentive to animal signals and the conditions under which they are produced. 
François-Bernard Mâche is aware of this dimension. That's why he wanted to take a closer look at a number of typical recordings of hunting music from various peoples, particularly from sub-Saharan Africa, music intended to celebrate the hunt, call in the game and describe the events of the hunt. 

It should also be noted that animal signals are mainly utilitarian, such as territorial marking, challenging, calling and warning of danger. These signals include coordinated patterns that are the equivalent of human musical structures: melody, timbre melodies, monody, polyphony, repetitions, rhythmic variations, transpositions, interpolations, imitations, diatonic, chromatic and ultrachromatic scales. All these schemas incorporate the techniques of contemporary Western art. François-Bernard Mâche's use of sound models is part of this approach. In this way, he broadens his musical perspectives, making it possible to recognise music as "a biological function widely spread beyond even the human species, and other musical species as representing alien forms of thought, often more frustrated than our own, but nonetheless interesting to know about. "34 
In Rituel de l'oubli, the integration of raw natural sound models (mammals, birds, languages, sounds of war, sounds of the sea, wind and fire) is not just about using elements of nature in the bucolic sense. Above all, it is about using the hidden laws of the animal world. Although the recorded sounds are used as they are, the composer disconnects them from their initial context in order to link or blend them with the material he has previously developed, through formal or expressive affinities. In this way, for example, he combines the sounds of ancient or oriental reed instruments, whose vibrations are very close to those of certain insect songs, while the sounds of bees are mixed with those of fire. 
As for Lanterne magique (1959), it is part of the process of enhancing myth in music. The sound evoked by the African sanza plays a key role, and the composer used it to give the work a symbolic value. 

Apollinaire Anakesa Kululuka, "Approche de l'expression du sacré des musiques traditionnelles subsahariennes dans la musique savante occidentale contemporaine." In Internationale de l'imaginaire, Nouvelle série n°15: les spectacles des autres. Questions d'ethnoscénologie II, Paris, Babel 2001, p.197-231