*50 copies limited edition* Only a handful of years after their launch in 2018, the Belgian Imprint, Matière Mémoire, has quickly ascended to become a label to watch. Focused on releasing new works by some of the most important figures in contemporary experimental music - Carlos Casas, Phill Niblock, Oren Ambarchi, Hampus Lindwall, Charlemagne Palestine, Jim O'Rourke, and numerous others - their catalog features a thrillingly diverse array of ambitious sounds, pushing experimental music endlessly forward and often entirely rethinking what a label can be. Their latest, “Adage Vestige”, by the Belgium based multidisciplinary artist, Roxane Métayer, is yet another stellar release from one of our favourite artists working in the landscape today. Bridging numerous traditions of European folk in highly experimental forms, it’s an absolutely stunning and engrossing statement, encountering Métayer pushing continuously toward the unknown.

Born in France and currently residing in Belgium, Roxane Métayer is a multidisciplinary artist, who works across the fields of video, drawings, and sculpture, in addition to her musical practice - heavily focused on the spontaneous - that dates back to her childhood when she began studying the violin. Trained at the Ecole de Recherches Graphiques in Brussels, having received a masters degree in Speculative Narration, Narratives and Experiments, in recent years the artist has developed a multifaceted practice that transforms various elements that inform her reality, particularly organic imagery and sounds of nature, into a parallel universe that is both otherworldly and uncannily familiar. Active for a number of years on the European experimental music scene - working in the duo’s Gebogen Ogen and Sage Alyte (who released a particularly striking LP on Vlek) - Métayer has become increasingly noted for her solo efforts, allowing for singular vision to take centre stage, notably entering the world via her 2021 debut on Morc Records, “Éclipse des Ocelles”, and its follow up, “Perlée de Sève”, released last year on Marionette.

Métayer’s latest, “Adage Vestige” - issued in vinyl and cassette editions by Matière Mémoire - encounters the artist following a trajectory mapped and alluded to by her two previous full-lengths, pushing continuously further into more ambitious and abstract realms. Drawing on a palette of field recordings of the natural world, violin, wind instruments, percussion, and her own voice, the album’s two long-form compositions - “Passerelles fossiles” and “Présage d'après-midi” - increasingly depart from Métayer’s long-standing touchstones in European folk, embracing a far more experimental state of rest in the expressions of her dialogs of deep discovery between herself and her surroundings, moving through immersive drones and sorrowful melodies, into long, extended passages of a striking form of imagistic abstraction that border on noise and rigorous, DIY electroacoustic music.

As dense as it is spacious and wide open, and as focused as it is open to chance, “Adage Vestige” makes every timbre, texture, and note count, further revealing Métayer as one of the most interesting and ambitious artists working within Belgium thriving and incredibly singular scene.