Glass Museum

If symbolism is pursuing them, it’s because symbolism is part of the natural order of things: two years after Deux (Two), Glass Museum’s first album released in May 2018, the band marks Reykjavik with the evenness of a metronome. With eight explosive tracks, the musical identity of the Brussels-based duo takes a seat at the table of contemporary jazz.

The international music scene opened itself to the band in 2019: having passed through a boat’s hold at the Elbjazz Festival in Hamburg, the legendary Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, and even the Iceland Airwaves Festival, Reykjavik went on a tour of the world in the heads of Antoine Flipo and Martin Grégoire before finally being written and enriched in the studio. The result lives at the intersection of classical music and jazz, a chiaroscuro whose highlights are defined by their energy, and the always harmonious recording takes ownership of its electronic color.

For drummer Martin Grégoire, this record was a matter of “returning to the roots of a more effusive music,” melancholy but intensely alive—beating, even. Cinematic, too. So just as when the track “Nimbus” calls for alpine landscapes, the song “Abyss” has whales singing underwater. The band put its records in the hands of dependable artists and technicians in order to achieve this magnetic result and increase its creative potential: sound designers Louis Goessens and Charles Stoltz, jazz musician Jérôme Klein, and Parisian studio Meudon. “We have a much more mature relationship with music than we did before,” confides Antoine Flipo, who produced the melodic work in advance.