| Photo credit: Alexandre Guirkinger |
Getting bored of always listening to pop, rock, hip hop, garage, techno, punk, new wave, post punk etc.? Millions of other genres are available. Perhaps this will relight your fire. On the 25th of September the album ‘Cells’ is due for release, it’s by cellist, composer and producer Gaspar Claus. The single is called “Désir des Astres”, hear it below.
On the track, Gaspar said “This theme comes from music written for a documentary. It ultimately wasn’t used: the cello often carries that melancholic sweetness so unique to it, and it weighed the film down a bit. So I dug it up, reworked it, and pushed it towards an almost epic boldness. It’s an ideal way to kick off the journey this album offers.”
Five years after Tancade, a debut album praised by critics for its singularity, and several years rich in collaborations, cellist and composer Gaspar Claus will release his new album Cells on September 25. Conceived in a custom-built studio alongside producer Basile3, Cells is an album shaped by friction and breath, moving between intimate memory, desire, and vital energy. Driven by a fertile tension between the cello and its digital transformation, the record unfolds a shifting sonic landscape where organic fervor meets electronic metamorphosis.
The album bears a very short title, leaving — like its musical content — maximum space for the listener’s imagination. In English, the term evokes a fundamental biological unit, a place of meditation or confinement, a computing unit, a component of a social organism, as well as the three letters that form the name of his instrument of choice: the cello.
“I like the idea that each track is a musical cell, both autonomous and connected to the others. However, the album is not based on any particular concept. Music, especially instrumental music, doesn’t necessarily need a narrative or discourse imposed on it.”
Gaspar’s music takes the form of contemporary chamber music, deeply marked by the American minimalist wave and threaded with subtle echoes of traditional music from the Mediterranean basin, as well as the laboratory-like experimentation of modern electronic music. Fully unfolding in the silent folds of the night, it exudes a rare emotional density driven by intellectual rigor, without ever slipping into ostentation.
“I had my dream studio built in Banyuls-sur-Mer, where I live part of the year, because I couldn’t manage to work in Paris,”the musician explains. “I spent about a year and a half there working on Cells. The creative process was complicated. The album resisted a lot before taking shape. I went through doubts and questioning, even moments where I considered giving up.”
Clear and direct, with no audible trace of that difficult gestation, the final result — seemingly flowing effortlessly — appears all the more striking. To overcome this long period of inner turbulence, Gaspar Claus relied on a steadfast credo: “It’s simply precious to make music.”
Mixed by his long-time artistic partner David Chalmin, Gaspar also benefited from the production work of Basile3, a leading figure in playful yet avant-garde electronics and the artist behind the 2024 debut album 43°C on InFiné. Having toured together following Tancade, Basile accompanied Gaspar Claus throughout the entire creation of Cells. His imprint is particularly audible on “Amour Constrictor (Fuge)” and “Ecstasy.”
“Basile is the ‘producer’ of this record: he turned my fantasies of transforming the cello into electronic matter into reality,”Gaspar explains. Indeed, all sounds on Cells originate from the cello, with only two exceptions.
“Most of these sounds have been processed, run through machines, transformed into more synthetic or electric sounds, sometimes more percussive. Listening to the album, I feel a kind of fertile struggle between the instrument and its digitalization. The electronics remain organic because their raw material always comes from the cello.”
Track by track, Gaspar develops a constant dialogue between melancholic textures and dynamic friction (“Désir des astres”), percussive fragments and moments of fragile bliss (“Cells”, “World of Idols”), drawing sonic landscapes that are both organic and inhabited.
On “Die Wahl der Vögel” (“The Choice of the Bird” in German, his mother’s language), we hear the song of a great tit, an enduring memory of his home in Banyuls. “I play with this motif until it is gradually absorbed into the digital. Perhaps this piece speaks of a nature slowly disappearing, replaced by its digitized double.”
Family memories and traces of his father Pedro Soler resurface on “Colaïdo,” named after a small sailboat on which Gaspar learned to navigate the Mediterranean, likely returning to the remote Tancade beach, the original setting of his first album.
On “Cupidon,” the voice of Matt Elliott (also known for his electronic / post-rock project Third Eye Foundation) carries Gaspar’s words in an intimate setting where the listener becomes the “archer,” triggering the story of life and setting the living in motion.
“El Paradís Són Els Altres” (“Paradise is Other People” in English) is a response to the famous quote by French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre (“Hell is other people”), now part of common language.
“There is a form of liberation in going toward others, listening to them, taking care of them,” comments Gaspar Claus. “I believe we would be better off lifting our eyes from our own navels and no longer being afraid of others. As for the end of the track, it is a kind of metaphor for our world, which is threatening to disappear but still resists.”
Intimately connected, all carrying the conviction that music plays a fundamental role in our lives, the ten tracks of Cells form a perfectly coherent whole — deeply organic, offering a powerful balm in the face of the violence of the present time.
DeClunk 