The third album from Swiss/French composer, Noémi Büchi comes as the fourth chapter in her series exploring the physicality of music in a world becoming increasingly intangible. On Exuvie, she compares matter and memory, creating something altogether fragile, and completely new.
Deriving from the Latin word exuviae, meaning ‘what has been shed’, Exuvie is the skin cast off after a metamorphosis. This husk follows a different timeline from the mind – the tool behind 2024’s Does It Still Matter; it lingers and it absorbs, moving more slowly to life’s rhythms. It would be easy to dismiss it as a dull reminder of what once was, but look closer and it glistens with promise – of past healing and bold futures.
Opening track, ‘I was almost there’ reflects this pace, with its steady heartbeat and droning analogue synths providing a foundation on which Büchi can build. Subtle percussive flutters run throughout, reminiscent of cicadas – insects that themselves shed, mirroring the album’s sense of emergence.
Ever forward-thinking, Büchi lays her influences bare, using them less as a mood board and more as a canvas for new ideas. Texture proves just as evocative as sound: Brigitte Fässler’s cover art, echoing the work of Francis Bacon that inspired the album, adds a visceral, mysterious counterpoint. Even when working almost entirely with synthesis, the work on this project is fundamentally orchestral – rich in movement and dramatic in tension.
Most noticeably, Exuvie sees the genre-bending artist explore pop stylings more than ever, evident in the repetitious minor-chord walkdown of ‘dislocated bodies’. The track is pared back and punctuated by disjointed ramblings – “I am not a ballerina / I’ve had quite the day” – the irregular phrasings steering it away from mainstream expectations, underlining Büchi’s commitment to experimenting within accessible forms.
On ‘a divided surface’ short horn stabs reminiscent of those found on Sister Nancy’s Dancehall classic ‘Bam Bam’ reference something different altogether. It’s testament to the composer’s diverse palette that the track sounds more like something that would blare out of some dark-fantasy video game than a dub sound system.
‘beneath form’ comes as the most pristine moment on the track list, this time pulled straight from an anime soundtrack – something to signify progress and hope. It is here that Büchi’s electroacoustic craftsmanship shows most vividly, with flittering, icy synths gliding over a pulsating undercurrent of rhythm and texture. It’s another cultural imprint shaping Exuvie’s newly moulted exoskeleton, boldly wearing its influences like a chrysalis that cannot hide its bright new colours.
At points, Exuvie seems to shed its sense of structure, becoming unsettling and bizarre. On ‘I suppose’, two arpeggios slow and gain speed, with its randomly discordant, modulated steps making the predictable somewhat unfamiliar. The penultimate track, aptly named ‘structure undone’ displays the remnants of classical songwriting, with dramatic pad swells and echoed lead lines giving promise to build into a dramatic crescendo. Its beat, a pulse of sorts, is used sparingly – leaving the track in a permanent state of suspense. It never quite ends. Something is emerging.
This latest outing from Büchi unfolds as a study in contrast; There are eruptions of brutalist sound, as on the glitch-laden ‘the cryptic precision’, preceded by moments of emotionally charged orchestration on ‘after the fold’, which draws on inspiration from the late Romanticism of the 1900s. Through this multifaceted soundscape, Büchi paints her metamorphosis as a fluid state somewhere between absence and renewal. A place where past and future overlap, and everything is possible.
Exuvie commands us to confront the memories that shape us, whether musical, cultural, or intensely personal. In dissolving traditional genre lines, Büchi underlines the impermanence of sound itself, asking what lingers after the last note finally fades.
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