Description
At the crossroads of jazz and contemporary classical music, Ensemble Miroirs Etendus stages a dialogue between Steve Reich, a founding figure of musical minimalism, and the restless mind of Christophe Chassol. City Life (1995), Reich's landmark sound-portrait of Manhattan built from sampled speech, engines, horns, brakes and alarms, is paired with Paris Noir, a new companion piece in which Chassol turns the same lens on the city of his everyday life, following the traces of Black Paris through captured voices, birdsong and street noise.
Reich, born in New York in 1936, first fascinated Chassol as a teenager. In City Life, two keyboard players trigger sampled fragments of speech and urban noise live within the piece. Two portraits of restless, changing cities, joined by a shared social conscience and an appetite for music that speaks to its moment.
Reich Chassol is the first release on Matiere Noire, an independent label for contemporary and experimental music founded in 2026 by Emmanuel Quinchez.
Christophe Chassol is a French composer, director and musician known for a singular method he calls the "ultrascore": filming and recording speech and everyday sound, then composing music around it. His musical journeys have taken him to the United States, India, Martinique and Japan, and his fifth album, Funny How?, was released in May 2026. He has worked with Frank Ocean, Solange, Phoenix and Sebastien Tellier, as well as visual artists Sophie Calle and Xavier Veilhan.
A French-Irish violinist and composer, Fiona Monbet is the artistic director of Ensemble Miroirs Etendus and conducts in France and abroad, across a repertoire ranging from the classical canon to newly commissioned work. Her recent projects include Trois Reflets and Faubourg 23, created with the Orchestre national de Bretagne and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and she has directed collaborations with Seckou Keita, Abel Selaocoe, Antonio Zambujo, Ana Moura and Gregory Porter.
Based in the Hauts-de-France region and led by Fiona Monbet, Romain Louveau and Othman Louati, Ensemble Miroirs Etendus is a variable-geometry ensemble devoted to the music of today, from the contemporary repertoire to new commissions, combining acoustic, often amplified, instruments with electronics.
