Un salon au fond du lac est le titre du dernier solo de Marc Baron, après Hidden Tapes et Carnets, parus sur Potlatch et Glistening Examples. Le titre est évocateur et annonce assez bien la couleur de ce qui attend les auditeurs : au-delà des citations poétiques, c'est un voyage intime et sonore dans des contrées inconnues et immersives, surprenantes et inattendues.
Bizarrement, si Marc Baron était toujours saxophoniste, on ne dirait pas à chaque sortie qu'il utilise encore  son saxophone alto, et pourtant, maintenant qu'il fait de la musique électroacoustique, j'ai du mal à commencer à écrire sans évoquer le fait qu'il utilise toujours un dispositif analogique basé principalement sur des bandes magnétiques. Bien sûr, n'importe quel instrumentiste ou compositeur ne pourrait pas faire la musique qu'il fait en utilisant un autre instrument, ou un autre outil, mais ça paraît encore plus vrai dans le cadre de la musique de Marc Baron, qui est en grande partie construite sur la condition physique des matériaux (bandes) utilisés.
Les structures et les compositions présentées sur ce nouveau solo sont fondées sur le collage, le cut-up, et il y a certainement des liens à faire avec les poètes surréalistes, avec Rimbaud ou les dadaïstes, mais ce ne sont  pas tellement ces méthodes qui font le véritable intérêt des compositions électroacoustiques de Marc Baron. Le plus intéressant réside dans le contenu plus que dans la forme, dans la manière d'explorer plus que dans la manière d'agencer ces explorations.
Dans ces trois pièces de 2014, des field-recordings ordinaires et naturalistes se mêlent à des sons synthétisés, des bandes musicales décomposées s'assemblent à des bruits bruts. L'intérêt de tout ça : créer une zone d'indétermination où le bruit n'est pas plus musical que la musique n'est abstraite. Marc Baron nous invite à traverser un monde sonore unique et inédit fait de dégradation, de décomposition, de synthèses sonores floues, de musicalité concrète et d'enregistrements abstraits. Chaque vignette sonore possède son langage, ses émotions, son ambiance et son univers ; chaque vignette, qu'elle soit contrastée, floue, claire, sombre, granuleuse, courte, longue, concrète, musicale, réelle, ou imaginaire, évoque quelque chose d'unique, quelque chose qui nous fait avancer toujours plus dans des territoires sonores inédits.
La construction est parfois continue, parfois découpée brutalement, le contenu peut être très réaliste ou complètement abstrait. On ne sait jamais où on va arriver, si nous aurons des repères ou si Marc Baron va une fois de plus nous inviter à visiter des contrées obscures et inconnues.  Et la magie de ces pièces ne réside pas cette construction, mais dans cette incertitude. Le voyage dans le salon ou dans le fond du lac n'est pas seulement beau de par sa construction ingénieuse, fluide et précise, il est magnifique de par son incertitude et son talent à créer des espaces sonores ambivalents.
Julien Héraud l Improv Sphere l Décembre 2016

Inutile d’aller chercher loin, c’est sur le site de Marc Baron – hier encore saxophoniste inquiet de Propagations– que l’on trouvera un début d’explication au propos d’Un salon au fond d’un lac : « Il y a les sons que je collecte, ceux que je fabrique, il y a ce que j'établis en amont par des protocoles et que je projette. (…) La complexité des qualités, leur assemblage, est le fond-même de ma musique ; prise entre un réalisme d'apparence et le désir du plus grand flou. Je cherche une tension. »
Comme celui d’Hidden Tapes, l’assemblage est convaincant, et même fascine ; comme celle d’Hidden Tapes, la tension, recherchée, est providentielle. C’est elle, d’ailleurs, qui interdit à l’auditeur de vaquer entre deux sons et même de prendre longtemps ses distances avec tous ceux qui composent les trois plages de ce disque. Car il y a des musiques expérimentales d’atmosphère et d’autres de récital, que l’on ne lâche pas. Celle de Baron tient des secondes, qui jouent avec toutes les époques que l’enregistrement sonore a pu un jour ou l'autre attraper : la nôtre contre toutes celles qui l’ont précédée, et puis finalement : toutes les époques d’avant avec et pour la nôtre.  
Qu’importe de savoir si ce sont-là des souvenirs personnels, les derniers soupirs de cassettes trouvées dans un carton détrempé ou même, plus simplement, de vieux fantômes sur bandes que Baron fait parler. L’essentiel est en effet que ses inventions et combinaisons, ses récupérations et détournements – échange vocal père-fils, partie de requiem implorant sous le crachin, rumeur insistante de l’eau, air perdu de piano… – s’entendent sur l’air terrible d’une expression poétique. Econome, certes, mais qui, au gré des preuves de vérité qu’elle retourne, conteste à la réalité l’inhérence de sa nature insaisissable et lui oppose même un ordre dénaturé des choses qui, au-delà même de l’image (Un salon au fond d’un lac), touche profondément.
Guillaume Belhomme l Le Son du Grisli l Septembre 2016

Marc Baron’s ongoing work has been one of the most engaging musical journeys of the last half-decade. With each release, he continues to compel, flummox, provoke, and astound. After the dense, distorted landscapes of his previous two releases, Baron here uses some of his now established recording methodologies to create very different sounding pieces. Un salon is quite spare, a very open sonic environment. It’s tempting to hear this as a commentary on Hidden Tapes, almost like that closet full of cassette tapes were now discovered to be almost empty. In this space, we hear the voices of a father and a son as they wander from room to room in a reverb-y, unfurnished apartment. The father lifts the child up repeatedly, each time with a “hup!” followed by peals of laughter. Machines are heard switching on and off, vaguely recalling Taku Unami’s work. But the scene struck me as very touching.
Shrieking carny music takes over for a spell, supplemented by video game blare and horror movie organ. The same machine clicks on again, to a Doppler effect, then winds down once more to reveal the child now perhaps in the bathtub. Water splashes along with multiple machines humming in the background as a small rhythm is tapped out on resounding wood or porcelain. One key to understanding the power of Baron’s work is that he doesn’t simply assemble sounds for shock value or quirky juxtaposition; rather, he’s a master of spatial dynamics who effectively manipulates the acoustics of proximity (both in the recording spaces themselves – here via hiss, water, and mournful cathedral tones – and between the listener and the composition).
After a bout of heavy breathing, a hugely distorted low end voice, and a giant laser, La structure starts with a recitation of numbers, bathed at length in hiss and bird-cry. It’s like a digital beach, a different water realization of the process of time. Finally Baron arrives at Un lac, with the church choir returning to a setting of crumbling tape and laconic piano movement. Things flicker out one by one, as the sounds get more and more spare. A baby cries, and one wonders if this is another child in another place, or if, as I continued to think on each listen to this gripping piece, it’s a rumination on memory and death. Baron gives no easy answers, and permits no firm conclusions. That’s both the content and the consequence of his extraordinary art.
Jason Bivins l Point of Departure l December 2016

Back in 2007, Marc Baron on alto, Bertrand Denzler on tenor and Jean-Luc Guionnet also on alto were three-quarters of the unnamed saxophone quartet that recorded the ground-breaking album Propagations (Potlatch, 2007), alongside Stéphane Rives on soprano. Together, the four reinvented the rule book for a saxophone quartet in the new millennium, ignoring the conventional vocabulary and introducing greater use of sustained notes and pad noise...
Disappointingly, despite the album's musical and critical success, the four have not recorded together again since, but have gone their separate ways. They have become stalwarts of the Potlatch label, with about half of the label's releases since Propagations featuring one or more of the four. In that time, their paths have diverged so much that it seems unlikely they will reconvene as a quartet, a point that was eloquently illustrated by these recordings including Baron, Denzler and Guionnet, coincidentally released within months of each other...
Following in the footsteps of Hidden Tapes (Potlatch, 2014), Baron's intriguing first outing as a composer rather than a saxophonist, Un salon au fond d'un lac is rather more varied and focussed. Where Hidden Tapes was centred around the content of old cassette tapes—dating from 1965 through to 2013—augmented by the addition of music and sounds from other sources, this time out the balance has shifted in favour of the latter.
This album consists of three tracks, totalling thirty-five minutes, two of about sixteen minutes each, with a far shorter one sandwiched in between them. The style of the longer tracks, Un Salon and Un Lac, is recognisably Baron—multi-layered pieces that create their own distinctive mood, revealing more detail with every hearing. Although human beings are skilled at imposing meaning on random phenomena (seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a passing cloud, or Elvis's profile in a burnt pancake...) these tracks have no obvious narrative thread and so rely on each listener's personal interpretation.
The tracks frequently juxtapose contrasting passages to emphasise their differences—for example, glitchy electronic sounds and a child's laughter (As before, the latter sound can make one feel uneasily like an eavesdropper, but less so than on Hidden Tapes, thankfully.) Occasionally, a promising passage seems to end prematurely while another outstays its welcome, but such judgments will vary from individual to individual.
Strangely, the most engaging track here is also the shortest, La Structure, which clocks in at three-and-a-half minutes. It consists of a lone voice—Baron, no doubt—reciting decimal numbers (one point one, one point two...) which gradually morph into a cacophonous cut-up collage form that makes their content both unintelligible and compelling. That track gives a glimpse of an avenue that Baron should consider pursuing further in future. Certain passages of the two longer tracks would have been promising raw material for similar treatment. Overall, as was true of Hidden Tapes, Baron's work remains personal, idiosyncratic and endlessly fascinating.
John Eyles l All About Jazz l November 2016

The clue, as it turns out, is in the title. That “salon at the bottom of the lake” is a quote from Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer, an image much appreciated by the first generation surrealists, who saw the incongruous juxtaposition as a sort of motif for their own practice of collage – and collage is exactly what we’re dealing with here.
Marc Baron is a composer whose preferred medium is good old analogue reel-to-reel tape, cut-up, slowed down, stretched, pre-recorded and otherwise messed about with to produce new sound worlds for your consideration. This latest work unfolds over three tracks. The first, Un Salon, is quite linear, a progression of found sounds and field recordings, bursts of piano melody and aggravating clicks that, cumulatively, have a remarkably disquieting effect. I’m reminded of William Burroughs’ weaponised use of tape playback. This stuff can be dangerous, so handle with care.
If the second track, La Structure, feels more successful as a collage, it’s possibly because I’m able to hold more of it in mind as once, perceiving it as a whole rather than a succession of interesting noises. Imagine the Multilevel List function in Microsoft Word simultaneously developing consciousness, a voice and dementia. Imagine it shouting “1 point 1, 1 point 2” and so on at you, only it keeps repeating bits of the sequence and forgetting other bits. Imagine this happening under a dangerously buzzing power line, whilst you’re being attacked by seagulls. That’s what this track sounds like, and it’s my favourite of the three.
We’re back to the found sound routine for the third track, Un Lac, which is just as unsettling as the first. Those clicks are present here too, like the visible stitches of the thread which holds the whole thing together. Now that I think about it, there is a shape to the album as a whole, with these two linear pieces mirroring each other either side of the more structured second piece. The clue was in the title there, too.
All in all, a stimulating wander through the magnetic fields.
Ian Sherred l The Sound Projector l November 2016

Quiet, occasional creaking, shuffling, breathing — is this someone sleeping? Then an old, echoey tape recording of a man and a boy playing in what sounds like an alleyway. The man crouches, then lifts the giggling boy into the air. Another voice in the background, a woman’s. The tape is then stopped, replayed, and accelerated into cacophonous noise — ah, so we are listening to the sleeper’s dream. Dreams are held by some to reveal hidden emotions and memories; “the royal road to the unconscious” is what Freud called them. A salon at the bottom of a lake, indeed. What else lies buried beneath the waters?
Stopping and starting, whirring, hissing, speeding up and slowing down. A snippet of late Romantic piano. Slow, melancholy chords. Tonal noise. Another piano, this time soft and tentative. Tape artefacts used as instruments. A baby’s cooing. The structure appears thus: two halves, Un salon and Un lac, separated by a brief interlude titled, perhaps ironically, La structure. This latter track is very different from the two it separates, consisting of a male voice repeating numbers in English, with waves breaking, the cawing of seagulls, and deep squelching that might be the same male voice slowed right down. And yet in each of the tracks a brief electronic chirp, like the one my old Discman used to make when it reached the end of the CD, intermittently sounds, suggesting that La structure is more closely related to the rest of the album than initially appears — a moment of waking consciousness that only deepens the mystery of the dream.
In a lot of ways, the triangulation between (auditory) image, dream, and memory gives Un salon au fond d’un lac more than a passing resemblance to Chris Marker’s seminal 1962 film La Jetée. I’m reminded too of the dream recording device imagined by Wim Wenders and Solveig Dommartin for the film Until the End of the World. Of course, this is only one way of understanding the various tape recordings and manipulations amassed and orchestrated by Marc Baron for this album, with many other routes through the rich and diverse material no doubt possible. Certainly, though, the work’s vague air of melancholy clings to the senses like the aftereffects of a maddeningly half-remembered dream.
Nathan Thomas l Fluid Radio l October 2016