Circé

© Louise Lécrivain

Created in 2018 around the compositions by guitarist Arthur Delaleu, Circé is a quintet which plays free and wide-sounding jazz.

Inspired by the universes of Paul Motian and Jakob Bro, and firstly thought as a symmetrical sextet, with two guitars and two saxophones, the band evolved into a quintet with only one saxophone, working in a more and more horizontal way, melting a soft, dense, reverberated sound with the thinness of a collective and improvised counterpoint around themes and chord progressions which are slowly deconstructed, and echoed with folk, pop and free-jazz.

After having self-edited and self-released a first e.p. in 2019, the band released their first album, « Alcali », in September 2022. It gathers compositions taken from two periods: three in sextet with two saxophones, and nine in quintet, recorded in their newest form at the end of the summer 2021. The desire was to preserve the freshness of the music, not to keep on playing same things for a long time, to stay in the same movement as the one that leads the compositions by Arthur Delaleu as well as those by the other musicians: snapshots, vague songs which find their meanings directly at the first reading, barelylearned, almost dislocated.