Post-rockFolk & World
InFiné · 25 September 2026
The rule of CELLS fits in a line: everything on the record comes out of Gaspar Claus’s cello, with two exceptions. The percussion, the low end that passes for synthesiser and the textures filling the background are all the same instrument run through machines. “These sounds were transformed, put through machines, digitised, stretched, sometimes metamorphosed into synthetic textures or even percussion,” he’s explained. “It’s not a meeting between cello and electronics, but rather a story of transformation.” “Ecstasy” (4:15) is where the method goes furthest and where it’s hardest to believe any of it began with a bow.
The album was made at Al Viento, the studio Claus built for himself in Banyuls-sur-Mer after leaving Paris, over eighteen months with producer Basile3, recording it across the winter and spring of 2025. David Chalmin, a long-standing collaborator, mixed it and Alexis Bardinet mastered it. That geography isn’t incidental: the record looks out at the Mediterranean, and it closes with “El Paradís Són Els Altres” (7:10), the longest track and the only Catalan title on an album that otherwise carries French and German ones.
“Colaïdo” (2:03) takes its name from the sailboat that belonged to his father, the flamenco guitarist Pedro Soler, who died on 3 August 2024 at Molitg-les-Bains, barely an hour from the studio. Father and son had released two albums together on InFiné, built on a dialogue between cello and flamenco guitar, and these two minutes of slow texture are the one moment where the new record looks back explicitly. “The piece is infused with this memory, inevitably tinged with nostalgia,” Claus has said.
“Cupidon” (4:23) is the only voice on the album: Matt Elliott, of The Third Eye Foundation, sings a lyric of Claus’s own. “Die Wahl der Vögel” (4:00) — the birds’ choice — lets real birdsong in, a great tit, and “Désir des astres” (4:12) had been written for a documentary that ended up rejecting it: Claus reworked it towards boldness rather than melancholy and made it track two.
Five of the ten tracks come in under 4:20 and three function as links rather than pieces (“Cells”, 2:33; “Colaïdo”, 2:03; “Die Wahl der Vögel”, 4:00), so the middle stretch advances by accumulating textures of identical origin without anything from outside breaking the surface. The one thing that does is Elliott’s voice, and it appears once, four minutes out of fifty. The rule that makes the record is the same one that narrows it.
Five years after Tancade (InFiné, 2021), Claus admits it wasn’t easy: “The album resisted a lot before taking shape. I went through doubts and questioning, even moments where I considered giving up.” Ten tracks, fifty minutes, InFiné, 25 September.
Rating: 7.7/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre