Arcanes by Ghost Rhythms

Arcanes is an album illustrating the 22 arcana of the tarot deck, that will be available in spring 2024.
Each arcana is illustrated by Louise Laveuve, a french artist with a lovely talent.

Between 2006 and up until 2023, Xavier Gélard, Ghost Rhythms' drummer and co-composer, collected home-made bits of tunes and melodies of his own, and thesaurized ideas and projects his friends Camille Petit (GR's key man) and Gregory Kosovski (GR's bassist) left unfinished.

In 2021, he decided this bits would fit a large project aiming at illustrating images he bought from Louise Laveuve, a depiction of the 22 Arcana of the tarot.

He soon envisaged that project as a way to broaden the Ghost Rhythms' sound, keeping the "big band polyrhythmic" side of the band (Arcane 11, Arcane 16), and the intricate research in pulse displacement and tempi equivalences (Arcane 9, Arcane 15, Arcane 18), but also diving into intimacy (Arcane 1), mystery (Arcane 10), and sound experimentation (Arcane 2), thus keeping an odd balance between the lo-fi and the larger-than-life, in a quest of mixing sounds of everyday life and the grandiose, as Arcane 5 shows : beginning with the sound of his guitar simply recorded by the computer mic, you can hear in the back his wife feeding his daughter, until a gong seems to move the scene into a larger, mystical place.

Home made (Arcane 8) but studio produced (Arcane 3), simple (Arcane 21) but also complex (Arcane 19), he wanted this all thing as a way to reconcile the opposites.

In the process, a lot of not so expected influences came to front, as can be heard in the Cocteau Twinesque guitar sound of Arcane 7, the Leonard Cohen "Songs of love and hate" ambiance of Arcane 10 and the afrobeat of Arcane 12.
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Ghost Rhythms is a french band whose main purpose is to explore and play with rhythm perception.

ghostrhythms.net