Artist
Label
STROOM[12]
Les Halles
Original Spirit
STROOM
/
2025
CS
14.99
STRCAS-106
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1angels of venice 3:00
2couperin lydienne 2:36
3soft continent 2:52
4new age dream 1:36
5admire 2:01
6final 1:32
7breeze 3:47
8exit 1:33

»I was admitted to Son Llàtzer Hospital in Mallorca on October 1, 2024, following a psychotic shock«. This could well have been the opening sentence of a confessional novel but it’s not. It’s the first line of an email, which landed in my mailbox seemingly out of nowhere. The words were written by Baptiste Martin, the composer behind Les Halles. In his letter, sent as a pdf document, Baptiste offered his friends a concise but striking report on his whereabouts from the past months. In brief, Baptiste was lost, found, lost and found again, yet seemingly forever confined to the walls of his cerebral interior. The letter describes a loss of grip and self-control, like a baby water turtle trying to hoist his way out of the fish tank by scratching the glass walls, without any result. Baptiste is a musician and not a writer. His opening line is thus followed by an album, not a novel. This is the album. Yet, ‘Original Spirit’ doesn’t tell the story of his psychotic shock as a lineair nonfiction, it offers a vague resolution to all the mischief in life: the hope for the existence of an original spirit, untainted despite all that might happen during the course of a life.

The album provokes images of what I would perceive as indeed an original spirit of oneself: an abstract nothingness breezing through landscapes of colours, searching for places beyond the boundaries of what we call freedom in the material world. A stream of sound, nostalgic to a time that never existed, a mystical loophole that we know isn’t there yet still crave for. In short: the sound of an uncannily serene feeling beyond hope.