The quests of François-Bernard Mâche
François-Bernard Mâche is unclassifiable! In tune with the world, off the beaten track of post-serial and post-modern followers, he pursues a veritable quest, questioning millennia-old societies, examining Mother Nature and listening with an ear that is both acute and rapturous to everything that sounds, buzzes, chimes, tinkles, horns, ripples or sings.
He was one of the first to incorporate the slow melodies of whales into his compositions, he tracked down the language of the Mohicans or the Xhosas, captured the sounds of water in Cycladic caves or, like Messiaen, he spent a long time intoxicated by birdsong.

At the crossroads of nature and culture
An "ecologist" before the word existed, his work is situated at the moving intersection of culture (he holds a degree in literature, and for a long time wrote the music section of the NRF review) and nature. From these distant sound expeditions, in space and time but also in the interior of things, he has brought back shells, fossils, cuttings, airs from the sea and handfuls of fine sand, which he sometimes uses in an almost raw state, sometimes after long distillations or macerations...
...As for the creation, Athanor, it refers to alchemical rituals and requires an octet and two sequencers whose music seems to establish attractive or repulsive relationships with traditional instruments. The writing attempts to strike a difficult balance between large swathes of filtered noise and instrumental ornamentation. We found the subject less relevant than in the three previous pieces, but the pleasure of listening, the dream metamorphosed into sound, is always present.

                 Fernand Leclercq, Le Soir, Brussels, 16 March 1992

This concert, which concluded with François-Bernard Mâche's 'Athanor', well performed by the ten soloists led by Jurgen Hempel, director of the Studio-Ensemble Musique Nouvelle de Liège, was much better received than the previous one.

              Cégeste, La liberté de l'Est, Épinal 22 November 1992

François-Bernard Mâche kept things short with 'Athanor', for small instrumental ensemble. The sequences are well-defined and easily identifiable: the bubble episode, the woven episode, the gale episode. The illustrative side is deliberately assumed, but leaves something to be desired. It's a bit like the music for an imaginary film, not relevant enough on its own to make us forget the absence of images.
                  Hélène Jarry, l'Humanité, Paris 24 November 1992

The fact that everything is becoming more uniform is an old pessimistic cultural topos. The counterpart seems to be the specification of electronic equipment, which is supposed to represent global levelling. In fact, the Frenchman François-Bernard Mâche prescribes two Akai synthesizers for his "Athanor", a mysticism of nature, in addition to the woodwinds and strings in the instrumentarium. But Mache is not primarily an electronics engineer; he is more interested in adapting Asian and African exoticisms, to which he pays a tribute that is not devoid of elegance, for example in the heterophonic synchronisation of similar movement patterns.

                     Gerhard R.Koch, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 5 December 1992