The world premiere is an adaptation by the composer of his stage music for "La traversée de l'Afrique", a play by Eugène Savitzkaia. It was commissioned by the Atelier Lyrique du Rhin, the creative institution based in Strasbourg, where Mâche is a full professor.
As complex as the music is," he told Tiempo, "I am interested in talking about the spontaneity of life. "In the work premiered, there are elements from the polyphony of African folklore, from the polyrythmics of the Pygmies, without renouncing melodic components, in a great freedom of elaboration. The plot of the play concerns a group of young people travelling on the African continent, with the charge of surprise and magical exoticism which, miraculously, the tropical world still preserves for the French. "I put my teenage African ghosts into it," added Mâche.
Doctor in musicology... François-Bernard Mâche has a vital and emotional conception of sound creation. The resources of electronic music, which are so often reproached for the danger of dehumanisation, do not prevent him from saving the naturalness of a flowing language, capable of containing and transmitting the asymmetrical variety of emotions and imagination. Proof that, in this case too, it is a question of who makes the music and how they make it, not of the nature of the sound media. This is why the effective presence of the creator in front of the public and those who write about music is fundamental in the music of our time.

                                      Victor Bouilly, Tiempo argentino, Buenos Aires 14 Sept. 1985

The disappointment came once again from two musical theatre performances, a decidedly sick genre. The Atelier Lyrique du Rhin has gone astray with a miserabilistic and convoluted work (five young people from the suburbs, surrounded by rubbish, dream of a journey across Africa in an old, dismantled lorry), with vague synthesiser atmospheres (to which François-Bernard Mâche was quite wrong to lend his name) and wandering improvisations by the musicians of the Accroche-note. Yet many of those present were won over.

Le Monde, September 1985

The music: François-Bernard Mâche provided some recorded interludes, which in truth were of little significance.

M.M. Dernières nouvelles d'Alsace, September 1985