Marilyn Nonken - L'Origine du monde (2025)

Hugues Dufourt, founding figure of the French spectral school, draws inspiration from art, architecture and philosophy to immerse himself in sound as a physical and psychological experience. Dufourt’s spectral approach sculpts sound to create space for gesture, timbre and nuance. This album brings Dufourt's techniques to life, capturing his philosophy that composition is akin to "sculpting a block of sound", as his colleague Tristan Murail pointed out. The piece The Origin of the World reflects his fascination with the resonances of the piano alongside other instruments, thus broadening his sound palette with orchestral textures. Using spectral techniques, Dufourt's orchestrations amplify the harmonics of the piano by mixing them with elements of percussion and microtonality to obtain a "quasi-elastic" resonance.