Ambient Chamber Romanticism: Flore Laurentienne - The Echoes Interview
Weekend listeners hear our interview with Canadian composer Mathieu David Gagnon who records ambient chamber music as Flore Laurentienne. He mixes acoustic instruments with vintage analog synthesziers including the mini-Moog. He recently released the inauspiciously titled album, Volume III. He’s making a more lush brand of ambient chamber music emerging from progressive rock and Bach.
Mathieu David Gagnon : I’m not coming from classical music. I studied piano, but all my teenage years were very focused on progressive rock. A lot of Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, the first album of Yes, I really loved keyboard sounds like the the Hammonds and electric piano and back in the day there was no internet so I always wanted to know what were those sounds. So I saw Hammond and I saw like Wurlitzer and Mellotron and I don’t and I wasn’t able to put a name on each sound so it was very poetic period in my life to love something that I don’t understand and trying to know a bit more about those sounds. So this is where I think the passion for old keyboards began and after that I discovered the music of Johann Sebastian Bach when I was like 20, 21 and that changed my life and the way I wanted to do music.
John Diliberto crosses the St. Lawrence River to talk with Flore Laurentienne on Echoes from PRX.