We can talk about playlists, turnkey playlists, catch-all playlists, fashionable playlists, playlists for thinking, playlists for philosophizing, playlists for graduating, playlists for meditating, playlists for running, playlists for friends, the playlist is a must! Digital technology has globalized both listening and method. So let's get on with concocting our own unique playlist!

From David Sanson

Exiles by Alain Kremski - (CD Divox, 2008)
As 2023 draws to a close, my thoughts turn to Alain Kremski, who passed away 5 years ago, on December 28, 2018. An irreplaceable interpreter of the no less irreplaceable piano music of Gurdjieff/De Hartmann, he was above all one of our most singular "composers", who, although he was showered with academic distinctions at an early age, preferred to explore music along less academic paths. I was lucky enough to meet him on several occasions, and I'll never console myself that he's no longer here to answer all the questions I'd still like to ask him. A few confidential CDs document his compositional work, mostly for piano and Tibetan bowls. On Exils, he asserts himself as the most liberated of our minimalists - a stripped-down music ideal for cleansing the mind before the New Year - an inhabited cousin of Morton Feldman or Laraaji.

From Sandrine Maricot Despretz

Matana Robert, Coin Coin Four (2019)
It was the astonishing long-term project of Matana Roberts, jazz musician (alto saxophone, clarinet, vocals) and experimental American author and composer, Coin Coin, that kept me sitting in an armchair, headphones on, one autumn Sunday. Coin Coin is a strange name for a series of avant-garde albums whose ferocious aesthetic originality and narrative power are matched only by the boundless imagination of an iconoclastic artist who, in sextet or solo, explores the legacies of the slave trade and American identity. In addition to the saxophone, of which she is a virtuoso, Matana Robert uses the voice: spoken-sung, glossolalic recitation, cathartic howling, operatic voice, gentle lullaby, group song, and recuperation of various American folk and spiritual traditions. In 45 minutes, she weaves a fascinating musical and narrative journey.

From Bastien Gallet

"Lick the light out (feat. Madonna)" from Christine and the Queens' Paranoïa, Angels, True love (2023)
Station 17 of the 20 tracks on Christine and the Queens' triple album Paranoïa, Angels, True love, "Lick the light out" is a song of passage and coalescence. Comprising two tracks joined by an interlude in which Madonna is heard addressing the one who is no longer human and not yet an angel, "Lick the light out" sketches out the impossible, and therefore pop, place of metamorphosis. The first moment, produced by Mike Dean (the album's producer), with its very synth-pop sound, is that of a voice searching for itself, vocalizing, interrupting itself, becoming a child. The second, produced by A.G. Cook, founder of PC Music and one of the leading producers of hyper-pop, is one of flamboyance and effusion, where the voice asserts the fullness of its power. Through Madonna's intercession - " Where do you think I stand? / I stand in your heart / Just next to your lungs " she tells her - Christine and the Queens become something else. Isn't pop that paradoxical surface where flesh can mutate?

From Jean-Yves Leloup

Anamnesis - The Lake by Hélène Vogelsinger (2023)
In just four short years, French composer and singer Hélène Vogelsinger has carved out a place for herself among the new generation of artists adept at modular synthesizers, instruments that have brought new timbres to electronic music. Her work takes the form of concerts, albums (Contemplation and Reminiscencereleased between 2020 and 2023), but even more so in the form of magnificent videos filmed in the wilderness or in abandoned places, where she performs her compositions, tinged with spiritualist impulses, alone.

From Anne Montaron

The Lichtenberg Figures, Eva Reiter (2014 -2015), for voice, ensemble and electronics
Echoing the interview the Austrian musician recently gave to Hémisphère Son, I'd like to recommend this 2020 video made at the time of a revival of the composer's The Lichtenberg Figures on eponymous poems by American Ben Lerner.
It reveals all the elements of the composer's universe: the fascination with darkness ("black bile"), the interplay between the ancient and the modern (the piece sets a contemporary author's sonnets to music in the spirit of the ancient Book of Ayres ), the predominantly electronic color of the orchestra and voice, the psychedelic atmosphere of the work, between dream and hallucination, the fine work on the spoken aspect of the poems or spoken word, the involvement of the body and the expression of an obvious form of violence, directly linked to Lichtenberg's famous Figures : physically, the figures discovered by Lichtenberg - produced by extremely high electrical discharges that take on characteristic fern-like shapes - appear on insulating bodies, or even human skin, when struck by lightning.
The Lichtenberg Figures, a guaranteed immersion in Eva Reiter's "Intranquillité" ...