Mâche said that this Resurrection Manual was a "litany", he did not say that it was music. And, parodying the beautiful chanted Egyptian text : without going so far as to say that I am pure, I hope that I will not have been brutal, raised my voice, minced my words, done harm or harmed - nor, I hope", offended or blasphemed... (Even so, the initial 'dialogue' between the Mummy (the words of the computer god) and the Living One, she singing, anguished, her rising psalmody, subtly chromatic, increasingly urgent, breathless and ascending, is a moving and heart-rending find.

       Jean-Christophe Thomas, La Lettre du Musicien, supplement to No. 207, 5 May 1998

The major piece of the evening was undoubtedly François-Bernard Mâche's creation, Manuel de résurrection. This is not an allusion to the Christian Easter festival, and its performance on Good Friday was merely a coincidence, but a reference to the "Egyptian Book of the Dead", a text used by Mâche in its original integrity. Let's face it, this is the most accomplished and rewarding of the two concerts. A sensitive and subtle musician, Mâche is a first-rate creator. His experience of musique concrète, dating back to 1958, when he first worked with Pierre Schaeffer, has naturally led him to master electroacoustic tools, which have only broadened his palette as a composer and enriched his fertile creativity, since Mâche admits that he does not want to limit himself to acousmatic music alone. Although he stands at the console, the author does not perform his work alone but in the company of three live musicians, two on synthesizers (Fuminori Tanada and Martine Joste), the third being the singer Françoise Kubler whose voice is known to be malleable at will. An intuitive musician, enveloped in the crystalline sounds of loudspeakers and synthesizers, she brings to life the texts entrusted to her, and translates the essence of Mâche's music with confounding naturalness, a long complaint-invocation of unbridled lyricism and overwhelming expressivity.

    Bruno Serrou, La Lettre du Musicien, supplement to No. 207, 5 May 1998

Ina-Grm CD: Manuel de résurrection, Kassandra, Sopiana, Amorgos, Moires

Mâche's music invites us to "look at stones as a kind of poem", as Roger Caillois put it. In Manuel de résurrection, the composer brilliantly brings out the incantatory function of the text, taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead: compared to the tape, Françoise Kubler's highly expressive singing in the original language is both distanced and "naturalised". The dialogue between nature and culture (which the artist must make explicit and articulate, as Daniel Charles shows in the introductory text) does not, in Mâche's case, descend into anecdote.

        Costin Cazaban, Le Monde de la musique, July-August 1999

Co-founder with Pierre Schaeffer of the Groupe de recherches musicales, François-Bernard Mâche has been composing highly original works for forty years, based on studio processing of sound models - natural or cultural - that are far removed from the world in which we live. Whether it's linguistic, ornithological or aquatic, the recorded material always determines a highly artistic creation. However, music made with magnetic tape (in the past) seems more static than music made with samplers (in the present). The former remains broadly in the realm of imagery - as in Kassandra (1977), for example - while the latter truly evolves in the realm of magic, as in Manuel de résurrection (1998), inspired by ancient Egypt, which strikingly combines fleshy vocality, rhythmic jubilation and electronic primitivism.

                   Pierre Gervasoni, Le Monde, 4 September 1999