The Glad Cafe presents: La Tène + Suzan Peeters

"Another gem from France’s experimental hurdy gurdy underground, with a more traditional but no less mind-melding approach. 'La Tène is another example of this cyclic, repetitive trance music, but it’s mainly acoustic instrumentation which I think is really interesting. You don’t often hear that as new music.' ” Stephen O’Malley from Sunn O))) in Bandcamp Daily

True to its identity, La Tène continues to explore the cracks between tradition and experimentation, between hypnotic drone and repeated gestures, but this time they choose to move onto new ground: the hurdy-gurdy, the group’s emblematic instrument since the very beginning, disappears in favor of a stripped-down setup centered on two electronic percussions and live dub work.

This is not a mere stylistic twist: it is about transforming a constraint into a creative drive. Alexis Degrenier, long associated with the telluric sound of the hurdy-gurdy, can no longer play it. Yet he remains, above all, recognized as a percussionist and composer. With his companions, he decided to inscribe this transition into the very heart of the album: a way of thumbing their nose at fate, of turning a great and beautiful page, and of reminding us that La Tène has always fed on accidents, detours, and bifurcations.

Moreïne/Déclives is a warm and intense album, one that carries forward the band’s uncompromising universe while reshaping it from within. The roughness of wood and metal now resonates alongside electronic textures; the mechanical pulse of machines intertwines with the organic breath of the harmonium; and dub layers blur the reference points like shifting mirrors. Repetition, La Tène’s vital engine, becomes here even more mineral, almost incandescent, carving sonic landscapes that feel at once archaic and futuristic.

Moreïne/Déclives is thus both a farewell and a celebration, a culmination and a promise. It tells the story of a group that, for ten years, has refused compromise in order to invent its own language. And if this album is the last with Alexis, it carries within it the certainty that it will continue—beyond its groove—to resonate: for long, loud, and otherwise.

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Suzan Peeters is a Brussels-based accordionist, composer and improviser. She is constantly searching for new timbres and sound textures within the accordion, pushing its acoustic spectrum to its limits by manipulating the interplay between her body and the body of her instrument. She transforms the accordion through extended techniques, objects, and live electronics.

On October 10 Suzan Peeters released her debut album Cassotto on the Belgian label blickwinkel. With Cassotto, she opens a door into a hidden chamber of sound. The title refers to the “cassotto” — a small resonating chamber inside the accordion that warms, softens, and deepens its tone. Listening to this record feels as if you’ve stepped into that room yourself, enveloped in a velvety world where intimacy and grandeur collide.

Although this is her first release, Peeters is already recognized as one of the most promising names in Belgium’s experimental music scene. Her distinctive live shows — from leading venues across Belgium to a packed Café Oto in London — have earned her a reputation for combining accordion, electronics and unconventional objects such as a massage board into a compelling whole where contrasts come together in an unexpected way.

Suzan Peeters places the accordion at the centre of an adventurous and contemporary sound world — one that invites to discover how far an accordion can reach when tradition and imagination intertwine.