Progressive Rock
Cuneiform Records · 27 February 2026
Fifteen pieces for solo electric guitar, with no drums, no keyboards and no voice. The aim Frédéric L’Epée sets out is explicit: to give the electric guitar a recital repertoire like the one the classical guitar has, with no solos and no showmanship, the emphasis on the variety of the sound. Contre Courant continues what he began with 12 pieces for solo electric guitar (2023) and comes out on Cuneiform, which is not the first label you would go to looking for quiet music.
The title reads differently once L’Epée explains where the tone comes from. “Without thinking about it or seeking it out, the music I have created in recent years has very often taken the form of a therapeutic act”, he writes, and he ties it to the decline of the Western world: while some stand up and fight it, he says, others work to ease the suffering, “more like caregivers”.
The programme runs from “Festina Lente” (5:12) to “Le Ciel après nous” (8:38), the long piece and the last. Two pieces share a name and run to opposite lengths: “Heavy Current N°1” (1:56) in fourth place and “Heavy Current N°2” (5:09) in twelfth, so the friction they announce is deliberately rationed. “Regain” (0:53) is the shortest cut and opens the door on the closing stretch, and “Les Sonneurs” (7:23) carries three subtitles inside a single track: “Le Timide enjoué”, “L’Impatient” and “Le Romantique”.
Sixty-seven minutes of a single instrument, with the dynamics deliberately held down, ask something of the listener that the record does not always repay: the five pieces under three minutes (“Sarabande”, “Heavy Current N°1”, “Pluie Inversée”, “Anchor” and “Regain”) add up to ten minutes that function as transit between the ones that do develop. I have listened to it in stretches and I suspect it is meant that way, but the record says so nowhere, and the sixty-seven-minute album format says the opposite.
Fifteen tracks, sixty-seven minutes, Cuneiform Records, 27 February, which is the label’s date; the streaming platforms put it up on 20 March. L’Epée led Philharmonie from 1988 to 1997 and has led Yang since 2002, a quartet of two guitars, bass and drums. Of his solo music he says it is “intimate, introspective and secretive”.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós