Ambient music has never been more necessary. Lives are lived at a faster pace than ever. Digital communications mean we never fully switch off. And social media steals far too much of our time. For these reasons and more, cerebral detoxes are vital and what better way is there to disconnect and reconnect than by immersing yourself in ambient?
French-born LA-based artist Hugo Paris has a special gift for crafting breathtakingly gorgeous soundtracks that can sooth the soul and calm even the most overactive minds. “I carve sound to your emotions,” says Hugo. “I put expressiveness over perfect execution and, for me, commitment leads to intentionality. As a result, I often end up working with the first take even when there are several to choose from.”
In truth, Hugo taps deep into his own emotions too to draw cues for his exquisitely evocative sounds. And sitting on the horizon for a September 15 release on Decoy Recordings, Hugo’s new album ‘Nouvelles Aurores’ is his most vulnerable work yet – eight tracks of ambient, suspensory synth drift and weightless melodic magic that melts away your woes and slows your heartbeat.
Recorded over a transitionary period in Hugo’s life, it’s where emotions ebb and flow like gentle tides and where sorrow and joy dance together in delicate balance. “While my previous album ‘Threaded Habitat’ was about the end of cycles, ‘Nouvelles Aurores’ is about new beginnings,” says Hugo. “It’s about facing one’s fragility in the face of change, both good and bad, and embracing it as a compass for growth.”
More than an exceptionally skilled musician, Hugo is also something of a technical genius. He worked on the Nobel Prize winning aLIGO project, and conceived and developed the cutting-edge Spherical Wavetable Navigator – a six-channel synthesizer for creating morphing drones and polyphonic melodies – while working at 4ms Company. Sold worldwide, the SWN was favored by the late great Vangelis, one of the most influential figures in electronic music.
With a solo career arching over 10 years, including releases under his Lavender alias, and a background in acoustics and signal processing, Hugo has honed coaxing real magic from his modular synths, prepared tape loops, keys and live percussion into a captivating art.
A submission for this year’s GRAMMY awards, his fourth album ‘Nouvelles Aurores’ is his high watermark – an unhurried unfurling of sound that blissfully casts you further and further adrift from the real world with each passing track.
First track ‘Golden Milk’ opens like a beautifully elegant spring awakening with angelic choral vocals rising to the heavens. Inspired by a visit to his hometown near Provence and the childhood memories it stirred up, ‘Duality’ is rich and ponderous. The chords here have more weight as they stretch out, with hang drum-like field recordings, distant watery flows and heart-rending leads that echo with a sense of nostalgia. A collaboration with Slow Coast, ‘Chroma’ encourages inward reflection, its textures evoking a sense of sadness gracefully contrasted with glimmers of hope.
The gorgeous melodic haze of ‘Blossoms’ offers a soundscape so pure that time stands still, AMULETS bringing additional ambient depth to the track’s sea of tranquility, while ‘L’echo des Brumes’, featuring Nathan Moody’s field recordings, keeps you floating in serenity, gazing into the heavens and warmed by the radiance of the chords.
Triggered by Hugo’s realization that he needed to relinquish certain outcomes he had been yearning for in his personal life, ‘Red Celluloid’ has a moodier undercurrent and a nagging sense of foreboding. “I was coming to terms with letting go when I wrote this track,” says Hugo. “The idea of shedding old hopes is very fitting to the album’s theme of renewal.” Indeed, the sense of lurking anxiety melts away as soon as the infinite expanses of ‘Wilt’ – another collaboration with AMULETS – gently subsumes you in synth stillness.
Last of all, Hugo calls upon Tyler Stone – one of the first breakout female house music producers in the US – to bring her delicate touch to the nuanced rhythm and deep rubbery pulses of ‘Sunset’, where soft focus chords appear and disappear like wisps of cloud on a hot summer’s day. With its subtle sense of movement, this sympathetic closer softens the blow as you re-enter the real world and hop back on the wheel of life. The cathartic charm of ‘Nouvelles Aurores’, though, lingers long after the album has finished
playing.
“In the vast sea of guidance surrounding confidence and affirmations, I wanted to propose a perspective of compassion towards the most fragile parts of the self,” reflects Hugo. “It helps me to remember that vulnerability is not a weakness but a sign of our humanity; we all have moments of fragility. I hope this album allows listeners to find tranquility in self-compassion.”
Beacon Sound and Jacktone Records are pleased to announce a limited edition joint vinyl release by Hugo RA Paris titled Threaded Habitat. The new LP from Paris follows two of Jacktone’s most popular releases: Mystique Youth(2015) and Horizons Beneath The Surface (2016), which appeared under his alias, Lavender.
The transition to the Hugo RA Paris moniker with this album marks a more personal shift in approach. Threaded Habitat combines ambient textures and techno rhythms to reflect tension between humanity and nature—particularly the cyclical nature of collapse and renewal. It also marks Jacktone's first collaborative release with the record store and label Beacon Sound, which has put out works from veteran experimental musicians like Terry Riley and Colleen. Beacon Sound is an important node in Portland, where Paris also lives and developed the flagship modular product for leading Eurorack manufacturer 4MS: the SWN.
The album's closing track was entirely composed on a SWN prototype and recorded in one take. In fact, much of his work is done in layers of single takes with minimal processing to preserve its raw emotion and embrace minor imperfections. As an MIT-trained engineer and physicist, working with hardware—from modulars to guitar pedals and tape loops—is essential to his process of not only making but exploring sound.
Threaded Habitat captures moments of claustrophobia and bliss in seven tracks and three accompanying videos directed by New Zealand artist Sam Hamilton. Visual art plays a central role in many of Paris’s projects, which include intricate audio-visual performances and scores for full-length films like The Modern Jungle (La Selva Negra) and its forthcoming follow-up.
The LP will was made available to pre-order on July 1st 2019 with a limited, exclusive content sample pack. The handmade vinyl package features photography by Sam Hamilton and was released July 19 through Jacktone and Beacon Sound’s webshops, with worldwide sales beginning August 2nd. A remix release will arrive later in 2020.
Horizons Beneath the Surface, Hugo R.A. Paris' second album as Lavender for Berlin/Detroit label Jacktone, synthesizes sounds at the intersection of Sci Fi and children’s literature. That dark, supernatural space where Alice in Wonderland meets Dune, near the vintage animated film La planète sauvage, Lavender’s tracks create fantastic, surreal narratives. Each track is a chapter, scene or vignette from a greater, hypnagogic mythology.
Hugo R.A. Paris' approach to electronic composition is raw, live and immediate, favoring one-and-done studio takes as his vintage synths and modular racks drone, throb and sputter.
With the complex spontaneity of early Pink Floyd, and the uncanny atmospherics of John Carpenter’s soundtracks, Lavender wields these untamable machines to wrest from them deep emotion. This is far from clinical grid programming. This is improvisation and perspiration.
He tunes his ears towards an ‘early’ synthesizer music history – not to create something vintage, but rather approaching his gear as if for the first time, outside of history. Timeless.
Certain recordings are meant to be absorbed as sensorial experiences - reminders that music is not only about hooks and melodies, but it is deeply grounded on textural qualities, ambience and raw emotion.
This is the vision that drives the work of San Francisco-based composer and producer Lavender / Hugo R.A.Paris. His forward-thinking and ethereal songs echo the work of artists the likes of Alessandro Cortini, Tim Hecker and Deru, just to mention a few.
His first album "Mystique Youth" embodies the aesthetics of minimal electronica, the cinematic landscapes of post rock and the organic qualities of experimentalism.