Sébastien Radiguet - Lentomania (2021)

Sébastien Radiguet’s debut album is a minimalist and delicate piano work. A timeless universe emerges from the 7 ambient piano pieces, haloed with electronic textures. With this ambient record, the Normandy-based composer is taking his cue from the musical path carved out by labels like Erased Tapes, Kranky, Sonic Pieces or 12k of which he likes "the often introspective music where electronics and acoustics are intimately mixed".

This is true of Insulated Soul, a piece vaguely inspired by a waltz by Maurice Ravel, which was composed and recorded in a few hours in March 2020, on his 44th birthday. "That day, the solitude imposed by circumstances really jumped in my face. Insulated Soul evokes this solitude of the mind, but also the notion of isolation, as a process of self-protection or a survival mechanism," explains Sébastien Radiguet.

Listening to the album, we may think to Goldmund, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Nils Frahm or even Otto A. Totland whose influence Sébastien acknowledges on Weastern, "one of the most obscure pieces on the record".

With Lentomania, his first solo album, Sébastien Radiguet expresses the need to return to his primary instrument. The desire to record tracks with the piano thrived at the beginning of the first lockdown. From this forced lymphatic state resulted a fair and intelligent "deceptively indolent" record written and recorded outside of time. Here, less is more, the musician favors atmosphere, seeking to attract and stretch our attention with a set of ethereal electro-acoustic clips.

For this release, graphic designer Virgile Laguin collaborated with Sébastien to translate the light and dark, electronic and acoustic universe of Lentomania's music. Crossing mediums, Virgile Laguin feeds on these ambivalences to make us lose our bearings: a photograph of an out-of-phase Californian seascape decomposing under a rain of pixelated glitches.