“I have no hindsight on what I’ve done, but I am convinced that I did the best I could”
« Le cri de la tempête » - Molecule, pour Les Baladeurs
As a kid, Romain Delahaye was already finding the world around him too narrow. He had this habit of observing the sea of Brittany, nurturing his imagination and desire to escape. Very young, he serves his need for adventure by learning how to sail and grows up with those artists that changed the musical landscape worldwide. After 15 years and 3 traditional albums, Romain feels the need for a challenge. Something that will revolutionize his conception of music and his creative process; something that will revolutionize his life.
Chapter 1: The Taming of the Polar Circle
In the winter of 2013, he boards the Joseph Roty II, a super 90-meters trawler, alongside with 60 seamen. He leaves the continent with a few anxiolytic tablets, a bottle of whiskey, and several hundred kilos of equipment. His objective? Recording the acoustic environment of the North Atlantic for 5 weeks, imprisoned in this odd open-air jail.
Molecule will start here his first-ever field-recording expedition. Leaving with blank pages, he aims to create an album without a single synthesizer note, purely made from harmonised nature sounds and his mastery of technological equipment.
“I left without any music, to cut off from any reference, to start from scratch, reshuffle all my creative process. (…) I could have come back with nothing. I had no idea what I’d find there. This gives a very incisive, very rough outcome.”
Les Inrocks - Avis de tempete sur la techno francaise
This album will be called 60°43’Nord, his furthest registered location on the ocean, 230kms away from the Scotland coasts. In this mono-sense desert, with one smell, one colour, only the sounds of the ship and its sailors was breaking with the monotony.
“The captain told me to stop whistling, that this would call the wind. So, I kept whistling alone, in the corner. I needed this wind. I needed this storm; I needed this noisy mess.”
Facing some hurricane-force winds and hit by 15-meters tall waves, Molecule composed without any post-perspective. The listener is thrown upside down between the crushing sounds of the ship and the expanding sounds of nature.
Chapter 2: The Unbearable Breath of the Unknown
Therefore, Molecule had already established a sort of mantra in his creative process.
In 2018, he left towards Greenland for a new concept album. The rules were the same: let the nature talk instead of the synthesizers, get out of his comfort zone, and be confronted with extraordinary recording conditions. But the game had changed. Silence had become the main source of inspiration.
2 planes, 2 helicopters and an 8-hours sled dogs ride later, Molecule reached his destination. There, he will spend 36 days, looking for inspiration in the ambience around him to come up with -22.7°C, an album named after the lowest registered temperature during this adventure in the Polar Circle.
“The creative process was very fluid; I did not doubt on what I was composing. However, our daily life was extremely tough. Isolation, loneliness (…) we were confronted with a completely opposite culture that made us question and reconsider everything.”
Paris Match - Molecule le DJ qui enregistre dans des conditions extremes
The atmosphere has changed. The listener faces this wild and gritty environment. A breath coming in gasps, dogs barking, a shed sinking in the snow, ice creaking, exploding icebergs or falling snow, Molecule will witness and record, with one goal in mind: immersion. He wants us to face the same obstacles he went through, whether natural or cultural.
“This album isn’t about the country, the Inuit culture. It is my vision, the way I saw and understood this environment. It is very subjective. All I hope is for people to develop the way they listen, to nature, or their peers.”
Chapter 3: The Non-Existent limits to Creativity
2 years later, Molecule was already back on the field, in Portugal, to face the mightiness of the waves in Nazaré. The album that followed is in-between 60°43’Nord and -22.7°C, in between the ordered mess and the neat silence. Guided by his recordings and experience, Molecule kept his natural touch and added a singular stillness to release an album with a taste of sensorial discovery. This new artistic challenge made him lost a great deal of equipment.
“One year later, it still happens to me to wake up in the middle on the night with that odd feeling that something behind is about to fall onto me”.
L'Équipe - Nazaré m'a profondément marqué
Molecule’s music gives a whole new dimension to artistic creation. This of creativity without control. Creativity without prior inspiration. Creativity in situ. His albums are life adventures that brought him to his limits and arouse our inner impulses. Molecule gives us something else than electronic music albums influenced by urban habits and mechanical ways of composing.
His creations have a fascinating human dimension that places him as one of the most interesting artists of the current decade. The way in which he composes and produces gives a whole new perspective in the appreciation the listeners give. Through his mastery of nature and technology, Romain Delahaye gives them the opportunity to understand beyond listening.
By incorporating rough vital experiences into elaborated musical works, he leaves us no choice but to be entirely immersed in his creative choices. In the manner of a Beethoven composing a certain Moonlight Sonata out of his striking life experience and with a desire to break the structural codes of his time, Molecule and his talent for improvisation in extreme conditions give back to electronic music a noble dimension that blind critics sometimes strive to take away.