French composer Chassol has released his new album Ludi on Tricatel – having previously written for Frank Ocean (Blonde) and produced for Solange (When I Get Home), alongside collaborations on home turf with Phoenix and Sebastian Tellier.

Chassol’s says his new work is broadly informed by German author Hermann Hesse’s utopic novel The Glass Bead Game. It follows previous albums X-Pianos, Indiamore and Big Sun, also released through Bertrand Burgalat’s label. The French-Martinique, Paris native cites minimalist composer Steve Reich and Brazilian musical maestro and experimentalist Hermeto Pascoal as major inspirations. As heard in Savana, Céline, Aya (Pt.2), Chassol adapts vocal and ambient sounds from video footage and harmonises them in perfect sync to create a living, breathing soundtrack – the latest single perfectly showcases his audio and visual style – his compositions articulating voice, music and sound:

Chassol’s experiments caught the ear of Diplo, who in turn put Frank Ocean onto his 2013 album, Indiamore. Ocean – at the time working on Blonde – invited Chassol to join him at Abbey Road, to develop speech harmonisation on the album. Shortly afterwards, Solange – having literally Shazam-ed his music at a performance installation – sought out Chassol to produce several tracks on 2019’s When I Get Home.

Chassol’s imagination is expansive and his work is varied and diverse, apparent here in the surreal animated video for Les Anneaux de Saturne:

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