After tackling an electronic symphony on his own with "O," his first album, pianist and producer LAAKE returns with "VOLT," a vast and sunny opus that goes against the current of the current electronic scene.
Danger, that is what drives LAAKE. After tackling an electronic symphony on his own with "O," the first album released in 2020 on Mercury and two EPs released in 2015 and 2017, LAAKE, pianist and producer, returns with a vast and sunny opus, going against the current of the current electronic scene.
The piano loops, the musician's spearhead, clash with the percussion and drums - major innovations of this album - in a progressive and controlled deluge. The energy of the album easily navigates through assumed electronic and classical dimensions, flirting with organ sounds, powerful basses, and polyphonic voices, witnesses to the urgency that emerges from each track. Recorded with 10 musicians from classical and jazz backgrounds between Paris and Brussels, the 10 tracks that make up the album follow one another but do not resemble each other, driven by the irresistible need the musician has to surprise us.
Yet "VOLT," LAAKE's second studio album, was initially conceived as a solo piano album, a collection among hundreds of snippets of melodies recorded by the musician and carefully preserved over the past ten years. History had other plans: "During the recording of the first track of the album, barefoot, I suffered an electrocution, or rather an electrification, the former being fatal, when I touched with my arm a dubious light fixture. Thrown back by the shock, convinced I was living my last moments, I noticed several minutes later the multiple burns appearing on my body, stunned. This was followed by a visit to the hospital and a psychological trauma that would last more than a year, unable to touch a switch or screw in a bulb. The current had passed through me but I was still very much there."
A remedy? "LAAKE" means "medicine" in Finnish. A necessity rather, that of reinventing oneself, of metamorphosing to be reborn better.