Mathieu Vanasse - Archipel (2019)

It is said that the best way to discover a city is to get lost in it. After composing music for film, TV, theatre and animation for over 20 years, Montreal composer Mathieu Vanasse felt it was time to lose himself in a personal project of his own works and explore his own inner map, an archipelago of the mind. His approach on this gentle and evocative album, Archipel, is one where he blends electronic elements with piano and strings into pathless, hypnotic soundscapes - like travelling without a map. If his work as film composer was underscoring images, the original works on this opus are cinematic in their own right. Naming Erik Satie and Talk Talk's last two albums, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock as influences, Vanasse goes on to say, ''I feel that this album, although a departure for me, is still influenced by what is done in composing for image, that blending of the organic and electronic elements.'' In order to let his subconscious flow as freely as possible, he began each piece on his main instrument, the piano. ''I always composed the melody on the piano first and then built up around it afterwards,'' says Vanasse. His use of the piano on the album found him quite literally with one hand in the acoustic world and the other in the computer one. ''I thought I would compose mainly on my grand piano, but I ended mixing things up. I sometimes used the MIDI piano for the left hand and the acoustic one for the right hand. The MIDI piano allowed me to distort sounds with the hammers and slightly detune things if I wished,'' he says. The deceptively simple melodies are immersed in a carefully textured palette of live strings, bass clarinet and other instruments that are used in their natural state as well as going through a myriad of computer processing to achieve the sonic richness of the album. Mathieu elaborates on his process by saying, ''I sometimes used sounds from inside the piano, or found short samples that I would pitch shift or slow down. I used the same approach when needed on strings as well as brass samples''.