This rite of passage from one year to the next, a symbol of continuity rather than discontinuity, where we'd like to change everything but nothing really changes, sometimes plunges us into a sweet melancholy... before the cycle of our lives throws us into the pot of everyday life. So, while we wait for the next time loop, let's let some honey flow into our ears.

From Guillaume Kosmicki

Nina Simone's "Consummation" (Silk and Soul, 1967)
Nina Simone 'sSilk and Soul instantly became a bedside album when I discovered it, and has never left my turntable. This album is perfectly balanced in its themes, between political songs and love songs, and in its aesthetics. Nourished by the sources of African-American music as much as those of classical music, notably the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, it abounds in rich, delicate pop arrangements, written by Sammy Lowe. Such is the case with "Consummation", a love song tinged with spirituality and a yearning for joy and peace. Nina Simone's heart-rending voice evolves from softness to screaming over a contrapuntal orchestral edifice, built gradually from clarinet to timpani, which ends the album in apotheosis. When she wrote this song, Nina Simone was at the height of her fight for black civil rights. She was about to burn her wings.

From Michèle Tosi

Jardin Zen (1999) by Allain Gaussin.
A mixed work for clarinet and fixed sounds,Allain Gaussin's Jardin Zen is a meditation on emptiness, between the fixed and the changing, in search of the very essence of life and an attempt to reach Satori (supreme enlightenment). The work attempts to capture the singular atmosphere of Kyoto's famous Ryoan-ji temple garden through the composer's own experience of the spirituality of Japanese culture. Jardin Zen is dedicated to Gérard Grisey, who died in 1998.

From François Mardirossian

Hayi Achqer (Armenian Eyes) by Robert Amirkhanyan
This song by composer and singer Robert Amirkhanyan is as big a hit in Armenia asAvec le temps by Léo Ferré. It poetically recounts the Armenian sentiment of suffering and piety. As one news item chases another, this magnificent song is there to prevent Armenia from once again sinking into anonymity.
The eyes of Armenians are torches of hope
Your sky will darken no more
The door to dawn has opened
Fill our land with light

From Sandrine Maricot Despretz

"Vapours" (Of Shadow and Substance) by Lea Bertucci, for quartet and electronics.
Thanks to the excellent Quartetto Maurice, who enchanted me during the Mixtur festival in Barcelona in 2023, I'm discovering, almost at the same time as you, the masterful work of composer and sound artist Lea Bertucci. Based in New York, Bertucci loves nothing more than to explore atypical places with music, improvised or written, with her saxophone or on tape, creating long, fluid, moving musical lines. The contemplative, semi-improvised notes of "Vapours" blend the four string instruments into a buzzing stream, drifting from consonance to discordance in harmonic clusters, conveying a state of transition from volatile tumult to languorous, misty trance...

From Txema Seglers

Arrebato by Luis Eduardo Aute
Aute, a renaissance man, is a key figure in understanding how music and lyrics unite into a solid, profound and sincere organism. His long discography bears witness to a constant search for beauty, the mystery of the human soul and eroticism, always refusing to repeat himself and relying, with each new step, on imagination and art. I chose this song for a specific reason: not only does it seem to me to be one of his best creations, but also because it conveys the pleasure and desire to live, while striving to leave behind old grudges and miseries. In a world increasingly violent and crude, plunged into the blindness of war, I remember what Aute expresses in this beautiful song in crescendo: "With you I'll rediscover the sense of the duel between opposites and I'll lose what I felt/love the adversary...".