Volume III

Description

Anchored in the Quebec territory and inspired by the vastness of the Saint Lawrence River, the music of Flore Laurentienne — born from a harmonious marriage of strings and analog synthesizers — takes us on an inner journey to the borders of the sublime, where we discover ourselves to be both fragile and powerful, suspended between vulnerability and wonder. The message, the communicable here, is light; it is the seed in the ground that becomes a plant and then a flower, blossoming to its peak before inevitably wilting so that the cycle can begin again; it is the quest for beauty in chaos, from which harmony is born to transcend it. On Volume III, Mathieu David Gagnon and his Flore Laurentienne return to celebrate the magnificence of the river and its floral and forest surroundings. Volume III is also a deeper exploration of the arrangements of acoustic and synthetic elements that characterize Flore Laurentienne. Unlike the first three albums, most of the pieces were worked on with the band members during residencies and concerts before being recorded, which nourished the compositions at a stage where they were still in motion. The band fuels the project and stimulates Gagnon's writing by advancing the sound of the project, nurturing it, allowing it to go further. This new milestone also marks the end of a trilogy that began in 2019 with Volume 1 — with the inherent and parallel aspiration to reach a third volume in order to pay tribute to Volume 3, the first album of L'Infonie (a cult collective from Quebec that combined jazz, prog, scholarly music, and poetry, among other things). The latter did not influence the music of Flore Laurentienne per se, but rather its conception of freedom in composition, combining classical and improvisation, in particular. The progression of Volume III aligns with the evolution of the project: where the first piece "Fleurs" is close to what Volume II offered, "(À travers les) Chablis," in conclusion, shows us what the future might look like. It is an album to be taken with its two predecessors while being open to the next step. Flore Laurentienne is in constant evolution, but from the beginning, the vision has remained the same: to create living, true, human, and uncompromising music.