Etienne Jaumet Du cortex A l'iris

Eight years have passed since 8 regards obliques, the album in which Jaumet reinvented his
spiritual jazz classics, letting them drift into other dimensions. Since then, an intense tour
alongside Thomas de Pourquery and a new recording adventure with Zombie Zombie have
taken him on the road. Yet it is in the inspiring calm of his brand-new studio in Bagnolet that he
found the material for Du cortex à l’iris, his new album recorded for his label Versatile Records.
Du cortex à l’iris continues this delicate balance that defines Jaumet’s signature: a constant
tension between hypnotic abstraction and an almost animal groove. "To reduce the distance
between my cortex and my senses, in order to compose mental images with sounds," he says.
This intention runs through the entire album: a desire to make people dance, yes, but with
echoes of EBM, bursts of cinematic landscapes, and that singular way of slowly inducing trance
rather than declaring it. Saxophone, synths, analog drum machines: the arsenal remains
familiar, but the approach is even more direct. Playing fast, composing in the moment, letting the
hand run before the mind corrects. Capturing something primal, spontaneous, almost raw – as if
the sound were really passing, this time, directly from the cortex to the iris.