Information : Simon Fauteux / Patricia Clavel
Montreal, April 2021 – Montreal composer Simon Leoza (formerly known as Tambour) will release his debut album Albatross on April 30 via Rosemarie Records.
Following the singles « La nuée », « Bloom » and « L’archange », Albatross is Simon Leoza‘s first full-length album, bringing together unique pieces that the composer has accumulated and shaped over the past six years. Like the path of the seabird that flies great distances, the composition and production of Albatross spanned several years of musical exploration and overseas journeys.
After two creative residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Simon Leoza flies to Iceland where he begins pre-production of the album with fellow artist Snorri Hallgrímsson. Inspired by the awe-inspiring Scandinavian nature, he then spent some time in the Faroe Islands, a subarctic archipelago located in the Atlantic Ocean. Back in Quebec, he teamed up with Blaise Borboën-Léonard (Queen KA, Lydia Képinski) who co-produced the album with him. Albatross was recorded at Montreal’s Studio Makina and at Studio Le Nid in St-Adrien. Leoza took advantage of his countryside trip to use the acoustics of the village church and record with the string quartet.
The album’s 10 original pieces go from the grandiose to the intimate, characteristic of the composer’s universe. More delicate pieces intermingle with the lively emotions of more energetic pieces. Rich in instrumentation and electronic textures, Albatross is a daring emotional journey, subtly mixed by Tonio Morin-Vargas (Flore Laurentienne, Bon Enfant). If the artist’s previous EP Constellations (ou comment arrêter le temps) explored time and astronomy, Albatross portrays a personal and authentic travel account of wonder and curiosity, somewhere between the vertigo of the mystic and the comfort of reality…
Simon Leoza’s music, cinematographic, ambient and moving, evokes as much Nils Frahm or Max Richter, as Ólafur Arnalds and Philip Glass. Endowed with a natural versatility and without any musical training, he has instinctively developed his own musical language over the years, which he communicates to his collaborators and musicians for the realization of his works. Over the last few years, Simon Leoza has also become known as a screen composer, notably for the short film “Take Me To A Nice Place” by Kristof Brandl, starring Roy Dupuis and Pascale Buissières, broadcasted on HBO Europe, or for the webseries Germain s’éteint from Dan & PAG that aired on tou.tv. With over 3.5 million streams online, his first three EPs captured the attention of national and international critics, who described his works as melancholic and grandiose, blending mellow acoustics and dreamlike landscapes steeped in nostalgia.
Source : Rosemarie Records
Gérance : Sarah Labelle – sarah@simonleoza.com
Booking : Rosemarie Records – Vincent Quirion | vincent@rosemarierecords.com