Listen: Flore Laurentienne – ‘Fleuve VII’

Flore Laurentienne—the project of composer and orchestrator Mathieu David Gagnon—returns with ‘Fleuve VII’, a new piece from his upcoming album Volume III, arriving April 10. This new work highlights a delicate dialogue between the piano and the string orchestra, carried by minimalist and hypnotic writing. Mathieu David Gagnon explains: “I created this series of pieces, called Fleuve, based on a fairly simple concept: reusing the same chords, but in a different order. The idea is to evoke the changing character of the St. Lawrence River.” Watch the accompanied visual piece here.

Flore Laurentienne’s compositions have enjoyed remarkable success since the beginning of the year. Three of his pieces feature in the César-nominated film Nino, directed by Pauline Loquès and starring Théodore Pellerin, who won the Q d’Or award for Actor of the Year for his role in the film. In addition, the piece ‘Petit piano’, from Volume I, accompanies Louis Vuitton’s spring-summer 2026 campaign, featuring Jeremy Allen White. Flore Laurentienne has also collaborated with Moog Music, an iconic brand of analog instruments, on a video highlighting his approach and use of the Minimoog.

The message, the shareable essence, on this third album by Flore Laurentienne, is light; it is the seed in the ground that becomes a plant and then a flower, blooming at its peak and then inevitably wilting so that the cycle can begin again; it is the quest for beauty in chaos, from which harmony is born. On Volume III, Mathieu David Gagnon and his Flore Laurentienne return to celebrate the magnificence of the river and its floral and sylvan surroundings.

Volume III is also a more in-depth exploration of the arrangement of acoustic and synthetic elements that characterise Flore Laurentienne. Unlike the first three albums, most of the pieces were developed with the band members during residencies and concerts before being recorded, which enriched the compositions at a stage when they were still evolving. The band fuels the project and stimulates Gagnon’s writing by advancing the sound of the project, nourishing it and allowing it to go further.

This new milestone also marks the end of a trilogy that began in 2019 with Volume I – with the inherent and parallel aspiration of reaching a third volume in order to pay tribute to Volume 3, L’Infonie’s (a Quebec cult collective that blended jazz, prog, art music, and poetry) first album. The latter did not influence Flore Laurentienne’s music per se, but rather its conception of freedom in composition, combining classical and improvisation.

The progression of Volume III is in line with the evolution of the project: while the first track, ‘Fleurs’, is similar to what Volume II offered, ‘(À travers les) Chablis’, the closing track, gives us a glimpse of what the next installment might sound like. It’s an album to be enjoyed alongside its two predecessors, while also looking forward to the next step. Flore Laurentienne is constantly evolving, but from the beginning, the vision has remained the same: to create music that is alive, true, human, and uncompromising.

Flore Laurentienne will tour Europe this spring in London, Brussels, and Paris, before a highly anticipated concert at the Maison Symphonique, presented as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival on June 26. The project comes to life on stage thanks to an ensemble of seven musicians—a string quartet, two keyboardists, and a percussionist—led by Mathieu David Gagnon, who plays the Minimoog, an instrument emblematic of Flore Laurentienne’s signature sound.

Pre-order / pre-save Volume III here.
Listen to the song ‘Fleuve VII’ here.