Ensemble Miroirs Étendus pairs Steve Reich's City Life with Christophe Chassol's new Paris Noir: two cities, two composers, one shared portrait.

At the crossroads of jazz and classical music, Ensemble Miroirs Étendus stages a dialogue between Steve Reich, the founding figure of musical minimalism, and the restless mind of Christophe Chassol. In echo of City Life - Reich's 1995 landmark, a musical reportage built from the sampled sounds of Manhattan: engines, horns, brakes, alarms - the Ensemble invited Chassol, a devotee of captured voices, birdsong and street noise, to turn the same lens on the city of his everyday life: Paris. The result, Paris Noir, sits alongside City Life as two sound-portraits of restless, changing cities, joined by a shared social conscience and an appetite for music that speaks to its moment. Born in New York in 1936, Reich is one of the pioneers of musical minimalism; his early work is often described as 'phasing music', after his signature technique of phase-shifting, before his writing turned toward rhythm, pulse and multimedia composition. City Life, for ensemble and samplers, marked a technological turn - two keyboardists trigger sampled fragments of speech and urban noise live within the piece. Christophe Chassol is a French composer, director and musician known for a singular method he calls the 'ultrascore' - filming and recording speech and everyday sound, then composing music around it. His journeys have taken him to the United States, India, Martinique and Japan; his fifth album, Funny How?, was released in May 2026. He has collaborated with Frank Ocean, Solange, Sébastien Tellier and visual artists Sophie Calle and Xavier Veilhan. Ensemble Miroirs Étendus, based in the Hauts-de-France region and directed by violinist Fiona Monbet, is devoted to the music of today, moving between the written and the improvised, the acoustic and the electronic. On stage, Chassol brings his own musical alchemy to a luminous concert punctuated by a piece from his album Big Sun, Reich & Darwin - a personal tribute to the composer who first sparked his fascination with repetitive music.

Track Listing

• City Life I – Check it out
• City Life II – Pile driver – Alarms
• City Life III – It's been a honeymoon – Can't take no mo'
• City Life IV – Heartbeats – Boats & buoys
• City Life V – Heavy smoke
• Paris Noir I – Présentation Répétition
• Paris Noir II – Césaire raconte Sib
• Paris Noir III – Himes, Baldwin, Wright
• Paris Noir IV – Césaire raconte Do
• Paris Noir V – Sorbonne
• Paris Noir VI – Césaire raconte
• Paris Noir VII – Césaire raconte zeuhl
• Paris Noir VIII – Rubato
• Paris Noir IX – Le Paris Noir contemporain

Additional Details

Label: Matière Noire

Genre: Jazz

Language: English

Run Time: 47 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 12/11/26

UPC: 3521383506981