Flore Laurentienne — the project of composer and orchestrator Mathieu David Gagnon — unveils Volume III, a new album out April 10. The first single, ‘Régate’, evokes a rapid shift in perspective, resulting in a lively race between a synthesizer ostinato and a string orchestra. On stage, the project’s seven musicians will embark on a European tour in the spring, with six dates already announced, from London to Paris via Brussels, before performing at the Maison Symphonique as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival on June 26. Earlier this week, “Petit piano” from Volume I was featured in Louis Vuitton’s new Spring–Summer 2026 campaign, starring Pusha T and Jeremy Allen White. Watch it here.
Mathieu David Gagnon shares the inspiration behind the new song: “The more the piece unfolds, the more the melody becomes desynchronised. It overlaps or harmonizes. The piece evokes a rapid shift in perspective.
In the last section, harps replace the piano. We replayed the harp tracks backwards and recorded the reverb they produced, then put it all back in place. The result you hear before each harp chord is the reverb tail played backwards. This was a method used in the 1970s. The synthesizer used to make the ostinato is the same one they used on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, the EMS Synthi. A rare English synthesizer.”
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 characterize 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.
Stream / download ‘Régate’ here.
Pre-order / pre-save Volume III here.
