★Three:four Records
Le Morfil
"Sarah Terral is Clément Vercelletto's double in a solo musical project based almost entirely on modular synthesizers. Le Morfil, her second album after Le Ménisque original (2021), is released on K7, vinyl and digital formats, and is based on short, haiku-like pieces. The musical mosaic is particularly rich and seductive.
This album is "90% based on modular synthesizers" (mainly Mannequin modules and a Serge 4U), says the artist, who seems to like talking in percentages. So, when he talks abou…
Le Bargy
I started working on this new solo in the spring of 2020. Mostly outdoors, as I couldn't work at home. The idea caught on and I presented a first version of the project in a forest in the Lot region (South-West of France), during the Concerts Dispersés series in August 2020. I have continued to play concerts, keeping in mind the idea of playing as much as possible outside the usual music venues, in spaces with remarkable acoustics. That's how I came up with the idea of Le Bargy: to present music…
De Bon Astre
Tip! Under the moniker Sourdure, Ernest Bergez works within a hybrid sound field, combining raw electronics (modular synths, feedback), acoustic instruments (violin, voice, foot percussion), and non-musical sounds (field recording, spoken voice). As a guideline, he keeps an underlying effort to melt experiment into popular music and vice versa, taking traditional songs and dancehall themes from the French Massif Central area as the starting point for experimentationFor the first time, I wrote a …
Le Ménisque Original
"Le ménisque original is my first solo album under the Sarah Terral moniker. The album was composed and played with a very small modular synthesizer. I wanted to make a very intuitive and minimal record with the idea of doing as little editing and retouching as possible. Synthetic, minimal, restricted, contrasted and intuitive music. Terral is my mother’s last name and Sarah is the name I would have had if I had been a girl. It is in a way my feminine alter-ego. I wanted it to be almost me, but…
Yann Gourdon
One third of the drone trio France and part of the La Nòvia collective, Yann Gourdon's practice focuses on acoustic phenomena and dynamic relationships with the environment. Having learned to play traditional music from Auvergne by listening to field recordings, Gourdon re-orientates tradition via minimalism, honing in on a place or location's unique vibratory fields, volumes and surfaces. Yann Gourdon: Hurdy-Gurdy. Recorded at librairie Pied-de-Biche Marque-Page (43) by Guilhem Lacroux. Artwork…
Mike Wexler with Synthetic Love Dream
n 2014, while wrapping up the mix sessions for Syntropy (three:four, 2016), Mike Wexler found himself writing a different kind of song. Whereas Syntropy had been beholden to a world of ideas laying just beyond the purview of the songs themselves, something new began to present itself - something more streamlined, more personal, direct, and grounded in a bedrock universality of form. Where was this shift coming from? - At the same time decidedly more straightforward and troublingly dark. With Nov…
Jupiter and Beyond
Jupiter, the gas giant in our Solar System, with thunderstorms a thousand times more powerful than on Earth, rainfalls of diamonds in the atmosphere, temperatures below -100°C, plenty of hydrogen, 79 moons and a South pole that looks like an abstract painting, has just the kind of environment this music seems to emanate from.
Jupiter and Beyond, the second collaborative effort of composer/performer Rafael Toral and percussionist João Pais Filipe as a duo (after Saturn in 2016), is definitely not…
The Xvoto Reels
The Xvoto Reels provides additional proof (if necessary) that Razen is an audacious group. If the Belgian band led by the duo Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour has explored different musical worlds with changing formations, the involuntary irruption of a sixth “member” has upset the content of this new album. Through these brutal and unpredictable interventions, it made an ambitious album - recording live improvisations in a church with an organ and a tabla - unique. “When we listened to the tape ree…
Vanishing Points
All sounds are created with guitar, with the use of echo, delay, and assorted treatments giving these pieces a trance-inducing quality, with repeating rhythm figures and gradual phase shifts creating a warped sense of time.
Vouerca/Fahy
Traditional experimental hypnotic endless medieval r'n'b. La Tène collect, listen and probe folk melodies and motifs of large territories, from the Jura to the mountains of Auvergne, weaving them to repetition and continuous sounds, electronics and frenzy until exhaustion. Their music, drones played with traditional and acoustic instruments is an invitation to the dance frantically, leading to euphoria or trance. Cyril Bondi and d'incise are well-known swiss experimental musicians. They have a h…
Racconto Artigiano
"Music of indecisive ways, silent writing, white pictures, noise and songs. Loup Uberto founds the Bégayer trio with Alexis Vinéïs and Lucas Ravinale, explores the traditional melodies of northern Italy, records intriguing sound documents - Cuban "raw" music, Eastern European travel diaries, Kurdish songs from Syria -, initiates gestures for French “chanson” with Le Saule record label, questions the gaze and its fiction, the rough edges of language, documents exile and wandering through sound te…
Dix Ailes
"Dix Ailes is a musical proposal for 2 female voices, 1 percussionist, 1 electronic device and 1 place with high reverberation. Between minimalist music and pure pop, Dix Ailes plays on an acoustic illusion, that of making indistinguishable the origin of the sound (instrumental, loudspeaking or architectural), based on work on harmonics, frequency vibrations, the physical resonance of the place, psycho-acoustics.Essentially centered on the voice, Dix Ailes addresses the notions of empty and full…
L'Inattingible
With L’Inattingible, Delphine Dora’s music unfolds by drawing upon a new palette of colors. It will not escape anyone, that after having sung, in foreign, invented languages, or through extended vocal techniques, the musician resorts for the first time, to solely using the French language; and that after having often set texts and poems by other authors to music, she authorizes herself here to sing her own texts and fragments.But beyond these formal enrichments, the new musical ambitions develop…
Les particules
Original motion picture soundtrack of a Blaise Harrison film. Since our first listening, we've been obsessed by the strange beauty of this small pop track that seems to be fallen on a dark hole. After having the chance to see the film before its screening at Cannes Festival' La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, we decided to release this music. The LP comes in a beautiful gatefold sleeve designed by Coline Sunier and Charles Mazé. Since 2004 Èlg has drawn concentric sound spirals made of musical pipes…
Zuppa di Pazienza
"Insalata Statica" (Silent Water, 2017), Giovanni Di Domenico's first solo album, allowed the Italian pianist based in Brussels to free himself from his abundant creativity by proposing six dense movements. It took him five years to record and produce this first record. With "Zuppa di pazienza", recorded and produced in five months, Di Domenico worked much faster, but the result is that these compositions are more thorough. Reduced to two, the movements are more refined, taking the time to devel…
Abandonnée/Maléja
La Tène is back with a double invitation to its third full length LP. The hurdy-gurdy/harmonium/percussions trio welcomes two bagpipes (cabrettes and 23” to be exact), and a combo of string instruments (12-string guitar and electric bass). Beyond the instrumentation, we’re looking at a gang of high esteemed guests: Jacques Puech, Louis Jacques, Guilhem Lacroux and Jérémie Sauvage, whom works are given their due credit (with the La Novià collective and its multiple variations, the France group…
Molen
Circle Bros is the longrunning onemanproject of Wim Lecluyse (founder of Morc Records). What started out as a way to experiment with sounds and recording techniques, evolved throughout the years into a more song-oriented outfit. The roots are to be found in the world of drone, lo-fi and improvisation, which results in songs that are half improvised, and therefore have a more spontaneous structure. A sort of singer-songimprovisation for those that prefer soundexperiments over traditional verse/ch…
Misztériumok
Misztériumok is the third full-length record - their first on three:four - of Italian duo Amuleto, composed of Francesco Dillon and his cousin and three:four’s artist Riccardo Wanke. Following the route of previous releases this new album emerges as the fusion of composed and improvised forms and moves between contemporary and electronic music mixing acoustic, electronic and real world sounds. The music takes shapes from a progressive disclosure of sonic material that gradually manifests i…
Estrela
Estrela is the third chapter of Norberto Lobo’s solo records on three:four. If it is easily identifiable by the black and white photography by António Júlio Duarte on the front cover, the music brings some newness: for the first time under his own name, Norberto Lobo is playing with a trio composed of Yaw Tembe (trumpet), Ricardo Jacinto (cello) and Marco Franco (drums). Paradoxically, it's accompanied by these experimented musicians that Estrela sounds like his most personal record to da…
Eudaimon
Delphine Dora, fresh from recent collaborations with Sophie Cooper and Mocke, presents a new album of solo material. Dora’s approach to the piano, her voice, and her compositions embraces the strangeness and intimacy of everyday life and one’s inner thoughts. Eudaimon lets her pure songwriting side sign brightly and clearly. Vinyl release on three:four.The twentieth century has had its share of poets exploring magic and mysticism. However, it is Kathleen Raine who has articulated the deepest s…