Release date: September 15th Via Santé Records
Music by Variéras
Dry Mix by Alexandre Debuchy
Reamping by Clément Variéras & Vincent Leibovitz
Mastering by Maxime Maurel @ Studio Noir
February, 2021: Variéras & Vincent Leibovitz are standing in the living room of the composer’s family house, dressed with sweaters and wearing warm coats. It has been snowing for three days, and driving the car out of the property is proving more and more challenging, so is grocery shopping… But they couldn’t be happier. Two large loudspeakers are blasting « Beautiful Blue Skies » (in reference, not without irony given the circumstances, to David Lynch’s Weather Report) through the room. At the other end of it, two microphones are recording.
It was Apollo Noir’s idea: to reamp the piece, using a large sound system to make the music bounce off the walls of the house; to record its sonic print, its natural reverb. The idea immediately made sense, since it’s in this house that the first fragments of « Beautiful Blue Skies » were composed by Variéras, as he was improvising on his grandmother’s old piano. It concluded a creative cycle that led to the finished work, layer after layer through the years, like an orchestral score.
If you ask the composer, he may tell you that blurring the lines between classical repertoire and electronic music was always in this mind. In his first three EP (« Mass », Land Arts, 2018 ; « Solstice », Land Arts, 2020 ; « Variables », Kowtow Records, 2020), the creative process revolved around orchestral colours, either with samples or recorded acoustic instruments, to which digital treatment was applied. In « Beautiful Blue Skies (reamped) », sound synthesis comes back to its archaic fundamental: to mimic the orchestra, but without quite shaking off the typical colour of electricity — and its magnificent flaws.
Biography :
Variéras is a composer, keyboard player and sound synthesist. His aesthetics are characterised by reusing classical and contemporary orchestration techniques, as well as acoustical instruments, in an electronic context. His influences include romantic symphonies, baroque instrumental music, or contemporary artists like Caterina Barbieri, r beny or Suzanne Ciani. His third EP, « Variables », was released by Kowtow records in November 2020; it followed « Solstice » (Land Arts, 2020) and « Mass » (Land Arts, 2018). Recently, Variéras took part in the ZUT festival at La Villette (Paris), and to the Electronic Therapy sessions by MixMag France & Electronic Subculture. He is also a permanent resident at the Château Ephémère, in western Paris.
