Quartier Celeste is a unique project in today’s landscape: here’s Premier Voyage, an album that goes beyond music to offer a complete universe, almost an autonomous mythology, which unfolds through music, lyrics, videos, and a collection of visual artifacts.It all began with a revelation: the discovery of NASA’s sound archives, recordings collected during space missions to the outerreaches of the solar system. What can be heard as we approach the Sun? What sound does a black hole produce when its electromagnetic activity is translated into audible frequencies? What does Jupiter's fifth moon whisper through the instruments ofa probe? Fascinated by this material and the strange musicality It exudes, Franck Boilard and Michel Kowalski, the two members of Quartier Celeste, decided to make it the raw material for their work. Each piece in Premier Voyage is based on data collected duringspace exploration missions. Some come from plasma waves or electromagnetic variations captured by probes, which researchersthen converted into the audible range. Others are recordings of radio frequencies emitted by planets or stars, which scientistshave “retuned” to make them audible to the human ear. Whistles, crackles, stellar howls: these are the ghostly presences thathaunt each of the tracks. An unlikely hybridization of rarely associated references, the duo creates a dark and magnetic ambient sound, infused with noise textures, cold-wave reminiscences, and industrial flashes. The overall impression is that of an abandoned ship gliding through outer space. From track to track, we drift through an immense space — sometimes calm, almost meditative, sometimes shaken by cosmic storms. We encounter supernovas, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, stellar winds, and clouds of antimatter. The infinitely large rubs shoulders with the infinitely intimate: the fragile, close voice offers a human counterpoint to these titanic forces. The whole is mystical, contemplative, punctuated by bursts of noise, areas of shadow, and flashes of light amid vast areas of darkness.
