Mue is the second album by Sophie Delafontaine, a triptych of acousmatic works composed between 2020 and 2026: Trouée, Bouffée and Tranchée. All three come from the same experience, matrescence, the identity and emotional transition of becoming a mother for the first time, a word joining maternity and adolescence. Delafontaine calls them the most personal pieces she has written, and says that composing itself changed for her, becoming “more about making place for something than mastering it”.

Trouée was begun in February 2020 during a residency at the Musiques & Recherches multiphonic studio in Ohain and, interrupted by the Covid lockdowns, finished in March 2021. Its subject is waiting: the months of trying to become pregnant, of medical appointments, hope and doubt, and of advice that turns waiting into guilt. Bouffée translates labour into sound, its contractions, held breath and trance. Most of its material comes from the Babel Table, an instrument invented by Jean-François Laporte of Totem contemporain, whose air compressor sustains sounds beyond the length of a human breath. First a mixed piece premiered by Laporte in Montréal in 2023, it was reworked as an acousmatic work in 2024 and was a finalist at Totem électroacoustique 2025.

Tranchée, the longest piece and a Musiques & Recherches commission, deals with the period after birth: the closed cocoon around the new bond, then the cracks as work and the world return, and the sense of being split between herself and the mother in her. It includes helicopter recordings made with the 40th helicopter squadron of the Belgian Air Force.

Born in Lausanne in 1988, Sophie Delafontaine came to music through contemporary dance, which she began at four. She studied acousmatic composition at Arts2 in Mons with Annette Vande Gorne, Philippe Mion and Ingrid Drese, completing a Master’s degree in 2014, and performs on the acousmonium.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 26204, 2026.