Flore Laurentienne - 8 Tableaux
Secret City Records
Releases on March 1st, 2024
Mathieu David Gagnon has a fascination with time and place. The Québécois composer, working under the moniker Flore Laurentienne, has dedicated his musical oeuvre to the task of exploring, of mapping: whether it’s the foggy technicolor vistas of memory in Volume I or the majesty of the St. Lawrence River on Volume II, both albums displayed Gagnon’s skill as a kind of musical anthropologist, an excavator of emotional truth, searching out our connection to Place within Time.
On his third album 8 Tableaux, Gagnon plunges deeper into this psychic territory as he seeks to confront time from a different perspective. Taking inspiration from the renowned Québécois surrealist painter Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gagnon strives to make a connection between the fluid, sound-across-time nature of music and the intrinsically frozen nature of painting and sculpture. In his search for the frozen and still within sound composition, Gagnon landed on the concept of repetition as a form of sonic stasis, and working within these confines he began a musical dialog with Riopelle’s paintings. The result is a deeply contemplative album of expansive synthesizer compositions that swim between the ambient and the experimental, drawing from neo-classical traditions and eschewing any semblance of traditional acoustic instrumentation.
On the quietly spectacular “La Nuit Bleue,” brush strokes stutter across the benighted landscape, rendering the melancholy hues in somber Morse code. A cold wind blows across “Feuilles IV,” and the music gradually grows into a staggering cacophony of overlapping voices. The slow guitar strums of “Autriche III” (which takes its title from a Riopelle piece) bloom and fade into empty space before climbing ever higher into a piercing crescendo that crumbles under its own mass. The icy closer “Bleu-vert (Vert de bleu)” echoes the opener, drawing the circle to a hypnotic close.
The album is a palindrome, like two mirrors placed in opposition, reflecting themselves into hazy infinity. 8 Tableaux ends as it begins, a serpent eating itself, time folding inwards; it is music to dream to, music that you can submerge yourself into, if you want to. Cycles repeat, patterns emerge and reemerge, and I am reminded of a line from a poem by Arseny Tarkovski: “Everything repeats itself and everything will be reincarnated / and my dreams will be your dreams.” It is a monumental, mesmerizing album.
- Harman Burns