Thanks a lot for your encouraging messages.
I’ve been asked by the forum moderator to provide some details about the album, so here’s my attempt.
Parallèles is a follow-up to Méridiens. Each album contains 12 tracks, and all tracks are inspired by a real, or metaphorical place. This is an invitation to use the music as a way to travel through space.
But the two albums are bound by another strong link : each song of Parallèles is supposed to be facing a song from Méridiens, and vice-versa. This is done by the use of some melodic similarities, but also mainly by the fact that the song titles are anagrams from one album to the other, and can be considered as “antipodal” (antipodal points of the earth have anagrammic GPS coordinates, don’t they ?).
This play with titles was a joy to work with, and led to happy accidents. For instance, the last track of Méridiens, “Everest Trail” (anagram of “Il Trastevere” and also the highest point on Earth), is followed by the first track of Parallèles “Les Mariannes” (anagram of “Insane Realms” and incidentally the “lowest” point on Earth).
To add more complexity, each song has given birth to one painting, by my old friend Corentin Grossmann.
Musically speaking, it is 100% instrumental. A mix of synths, drum programming, violin, “octave violin”, and some recordings of a small chamber ensemble (violin-viola-cello-clarinets).
Main synths are : Intellijel Atlantis, MI Rings, BS2, Prophet Rev2 and Ableton’s Simpler and Wavetable.
I also recorded a lot of my so-called “violow” which is a normal violin mounted with one octave lower strings.
Everything has been done home on Ableton Live. I guess not a single plugin was used, except for some personal M4L devices.
