After tackling an electronic symphony on his own with “O,” his first album, pianist and producer LAAKE returns with “VOLT,” a vast, radiant opus that runs counter to today’s electronic scene. Danger — that is what drives LAAKE. After tackling an electronic symphony on his own with “O,” his first album released in 2020 on Mercury and two EPs released in 2015 and 2017, LAAKE, pianist and producer, returns with a vast, radiant opus, running counter to today’s electronic scene. The piano loops, the musician’s trademark, clash with percussion and drums — major new elements on this album — in a progressive and controlled deluge. The album’s energy moves effortlessly through fully embraced electronic and classical dimensions, flirting with organ sounds, powerful bass and polyphonic voices, witnesses to the urgency that emerges 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 follow one another but are unlike each other, driven by the irresistible need the musician has to surprise us. Yet “VOLT,” LAAKE’s second studio album, was first imagined 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 decided otherwise: “While recording the first track of the album, barefoot, I suffered an electric shock, or rather an electrification, the first being fatal, when my arm touched a poorly made wall light. Thrown backward 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, making it impossible to touch a switch or screw in a light bulb. The current had passed through me, but I was still very much there.” A remedy? “LAAKE” means “medicine” in Finnish. Rather, a necessity: to reinvent oneself, to metamorphose in order to be reborn.