Riding high into the label’s 26th year, La Scie Dorée returns with the absolutely stunning ‘Ste Cy’, the latest offering from Timo Van Luijk’s incredible trio with Jac Berrocal and Vincent Epplay. A stunning effort that defies time, place, and creative proximity, this pulsing suite of sonic abstraction and poetic intervention has totally taken us off guard and wrapped its way around our hearts.

Timo Van Luijk is among the hardest working figures within experimental music today. Between his work as a solo artist under his own name and the moniker Af Ursin; stellar projects like Lumine (with Graham Stewart and John Whyte), Elodie (with Andrew Chalk) and In Camera (with Christoph Heemann), among numerous other collaborations; and his efforts running two of our favorite contemporary labels - Metaphon and La Scie Dorée - words like prolific and ambitious fall endlessly short. Returning our ears to some of the most vibrant sounds of the present day - blending sprawling, resonant ambiences, poetics, and bristling experimentalism into a single fluid form - it’s an absolute stunner from the ensemble whose collaboration with Anne Gillis, "Si​(​)​six”, absolutely blew us away back in 2024.

Since his emergence within the French avant-garde scene during the early 1970s, the singer, composer, and trumpeter, Jac Berrocal has helped to entirely redefine the perimeters of sonic practice and musicality, often encountering him embracing unexpected collaborations to further his own explorations. Just over a decade ago, this sense of openness brought him into contact with the Paris based visual and sound artist, Vincent Epplay, noted for an interventional, sonic practice rooted in distribution and reception. In conjunction with other artists like Pascal Comelade and David Fenech, over the years since the pair have established an incredibly fruitful collaboration, producing more than half a dozen full-lengths, issued across numerous noteworthy imprints.

Back in 2024, we encountered the pair working with Timo Van Luijk and Anne Gillis, producing the stunning LP "Si​(​)​six”, which thankfully resulted in a partial revisitation of this incredible ensemble, with Berrocal, Epplay, and Van Luijk reentering the studio for an improvised instrumental session - Jac Berrocal playing trumpet and double bass; Van Luijk on guitar, piano, vibraphone, and percussion, and Epplay intervening with field recording, as well as playing drums, percussion, EMS Synthi A, Noizoid OCS 2, and double bass - all captured in the secluded hush of Van Luijk’s Kulta Saha. These initial raw recordings were then later reshaped into 12 songs by Vincent Epplay at Studio Villejuif in Paris, and threaded with the vocal poetics of Berrocal.

The 12 compositions that comprise ‘Ste Cy’ feel as though they transcend space, time, and explicit creative proximity. Often hypnotic and always immersive, with Berrocal’s soulful, soaring trumpet lines carving their way through pulsing rhythms, tense long-tones, deep ambiences, and the abstractions of electronic and acoustic sources, the collective total of the album’s two sides forge into progressively experimental territory that remains remarkably approachable. Quite strikingly, ‘Ste Cy’ almost feels as though it would be equally at home as the soundtrack of some lost artifact of French New Wave film as it would on the Nurse with Wound list or a shadowy, smoke laden post-punk dive. As an ensemble and collective effort, the trio of Berrocal, Epplay, and Van Luijk are locked in, focused and responsive, effortlessly rendering a deeply emotive music of quiet radicalism that defies expectation at every turn, while doubling back upon itself with haunting familiarity, sculpting a pitch perfect balance between dissolution and hope.

It was hard to imagine it getting much better than "Si​(​)​six”, and while comparisons are a matter of taste and counterproductive, the trio of Berrocal, Epplay, and Van Luijk may well have accomplished it with ‘Ste Cy’. It’s an absolutely stunning body of work that has left us longing for more.