LAAKE - Volt [LP]

After tackling an electronic symphony with "O", his first album, French pianist and producer Laake returns with "VOLT", a vast and solar opus against the current tides of the electronic music scene. Danger is what drives Laake. After tackling an electronic symphony with "O", first album released in 2020 on Mercury and two EPs released in 2015 and 2017, French pianist and producer Laake returns with "VOLT", a vast and solar opus against the current tides of the electronic music scene. The piano loops, spearhead of the musician, collide with the percussions and drums - great novelties of this album - in a progressive and mastered deluge. The album's energy easily navigates through electronic and classical dimensions, flirting with organ sounds, powerful basses and polyphonic voices, all witnesses of the urgency arising from each track. Recorded with 10 musicians from the classical and jazz worlds between Paris and Brussels, the 10 tracks that make up the album succeed one another but do not sound alike... Carried by the irresistible need for the musicians to surprise us. Yet "VOLT", Laake's second studio album, was initially imagined as a piano solo record, a collection of hundreds of snippets of melodies recorded and carefully preserved over the last ten years by Laake. History decided otherwise: "During the recording of the first piece of the album, barefoot, I suffered an electrocution, or rather an electrification, the first one being fatal, by touching with my arm a luminous sconce of doubtful confection. Expelled backwards by the shock, persuaded to live my last moments, I noticed several minutes later the multiple burns appearing on my body, bewildered. A visit to the hospital followed and a psychological trauma that would last more than a year, unable to touch a switch or screw in a light bulb. The current had gone through me but I was still there. A cure? "Laake" means "medicine" in Finnish. A necessity rather, that of reinventing oneself, of metamorphosing in order to be better reborn.