[INTRODUCING] Grégoire Gerstmans

English:CD-preview
  Van Muylem    25 juni 2024

After a resounding success at Les Nuits Botanique festival in 2023, a packed house at the Quaregnon international piano festival and 500,000 streams on debut track Aujourd'hui, Liège-based pianist Grégoire Gerstmans — noticed for his instrumental cover of Apocalypse (Cigarettes After Sex) — unveils L'écorce du zèbre: a new track with a pure and hypnotic melody.


A veritable ode to slowness and letting go:

"In today's fast-paced society, I want to deliberately slow down time, to fill it with emptiness."

Following in the footsteps of the likes of Nils Frahm, Philip Glass and Ólafur Arnalds, Gregoire Gerstmans is gradually establishing himself as a key player on the European neo-classical scene. With a raw, unadorned piano sound, the artist has developed a highly personal universe between modernity and tradition. Passionate about music, but also about video and photography, the composer strives to create an all-encompassing, beautiful and sensitive body of work — just like his music.

Alone with his piano, he draws out the dream in all of us through the minimalist purity of his melodiousness. Be ready for your daily dose of beauty.

Listen here: pias.ffm.to/ggerstmanslecorceduzebre

"I wanted to shoot a video in nature, because I love spending time among of tall trees. I work with two types of camera for colour and black and white, to symbolise the past and the present.

I shot the footage with my sister and her little daughter. It's important to keep the memory, the trace of where we come from. It's in childhood and naivety that things can sometimes be the most beautiful.

I can still remember the little statue made of plaster that was sitting on my grandfather’s piano, and the smell of the old music sheets that were stored in his office. 

It is a family tradition, a little bit like a draw that you open and then shut again.

From generation to generation and from hand to hand, the witness of this tradition is transmitted in the form of a musical instrument. I have chosen percussion.

I can still remember the Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

Julien, my violonist grandfather and founder of the Hannut Music Academy, used to let me play on his piano at the end of the courses.

I was seven years old when my grandfather taught me my first chords.

For Eric, my father, it is the viola that has accompanied him for many years and took him from the Orchestra Philharmonic of Liege to Alain Bashung, William Sheller and Robert Wyatt.

At the heart of my childhood, he transmitted to me his love for the fusion of classical and modern sounds, the audacity of mixing different kinds, and his thirst for mixing different styles.

As for me, well beyond this duty of remembering and of inheritance, I always seek for the magic of the pure and founding sound of our first stages in life, this music played on the piano that will always remain engraved in my heart.​

I am seeking for this childhood, the innocence of a purified melody."