L’Eclair

Heyoooo, thanks for having us!

Bulgarian folk music has always been around & close to us while growing up in Bulgaria. Either blasting out of the TV, or at family gatherings or celebrations, people in Bulgaria love to sing and dance, and I think this was pretty influential for our early years before moving to Geneva in 2001, where it’s definitively not the same party vibe! In a way, moving to Geneva helped us believe that it’s possible to make music, not only dreaming about making it.

Yeah, it definitely started by strumming some tennis rackets and shouting lyrics from the skate punk era before our minds got touched by the music from the 60s & 70s, which we were actually raised on. We found pretty early a common love for the psychedelic landscapes of Pink Floyd while also getting down to Shaggy. In a way, we’ve always been curious and looking for new sounds since we were young, and with Geneva being a multicultural city, it helped us to create the L’Eclair sound.

We actually started Cloud Drifter as a band. But life sometimes has other plans for you. After years of touring and releasing music all together, our friends & band members decided to pursue their own careers before we had finished the record. It was not really planned, but we did end up leading the way till the album was fully finished, meaning finishing writing, getting the collaborations done and all the stuff. Working with a sibling is always an adventure, but it’s also really deep; the connections you can create on stage and in the studio can be insane, and it has helped us carry the band for so long. Even if it’s not an easy ride, it’s definitely worth it.

We first met Nate and Jamie back in 2021 while we were releasing the Maston record called Souvenir with them. But we’ve always kept an eye on what they do since we started our first bands back in the day. We’ve always felt that our approach with l’Eclair would suit the Innovative Leisure sound, famous for its diversity & forward thinking. Therefore, after our last record, CONFUSIONS, released at the end of 2021, we started speaking with IL about what would become today Cloud Drifter.

Cloud Drifter is closely connected to themes like the future and dystopia. We’ve imagined a world where each song of the record represents a planet of its own and where the Cloud Drifters are people travelling through the clouds, without a home, through this future universe where the dystopia has erased everything from our life on earth. The story begins with the song REPLICA M001 & HUMANOPOLIS M001, which is the centrepiece of the record (and was also supposed to be in one part). It focuses on the dialogue between our past as human beings & our future in a dystopian world (REPLICA M001). This frame of work allows us to talk also about strong human feelings like the track NOSTALGIA or the GLITCH while keeping our cosmic world of sounds. In a way, Cloud Drifter has been composed and thought of as an epic sci-fi adventure with a focus on the human feeling and story rather than machines and robots. We’ve been heavily influenced by the cinematic work of Andreï Tarkovski with movies like Stalker or Solaris to help us create this feeling of contemplative science fiction mixed with intense rhythm sections.

Some of the guests on this record are indeed friends. We’ve toured the states with Girl Named Golden in 2024, and we became family after that. So it was pretty natural to ask her to feat on the new record, and she did an incredible job in bringing the song THE GLITCH in another dimension. The same with Ines, with whom Yavor is sharing the stage in the band Roshâni (released under the label Stone Pixels, co-created by Julien Fawaz & Stefan Lilov). She’s one of the most talented musicians coming out of Geneva right now. So for us, it was a real treat to have her sing on the song CLOUD DRIFTER. We also did work with Alex «Foret Law» for our song NOSTALGIA. In a way, we’ve toured so much and met so many people that we wanted to introduce a lot of our friends on this record as our first vocal collaborators. Pink Siifu is obviously an exception on this one. We’ve been huge fans of his music for years, and we honestly didn’t have anyone else in our minds for a rap-oriented collaboration on CLOUD DRIFTER. He’s at the top of his game and is the one we had to call for the orchestra-drumless beat feel of REPLICA M001.

It was a dream. Some of us cried pretty quickly because this was always something we’ve wanted to do with l’Eclair’s music, and the players were just amazing. It was insane to be finally able to work with our friends Arthur Sajas, arranger, and Syd Kemp, sound engineer, whom we met back in 2019 with their incredible project HAHA SOUNDS. As we were entering a more futuristic and electronic sound with the demos and first recordings of CLOUD DRIFTER, we quickly realised that this was the record we had to add an orchestra to in order to bring more focus to the human feelings we wanted to encapsulate on the record. The highlight was definitely when we heard the string quartet play the whole part of HUMANOPOLIS in one shot, without rehearsing, just by reading the music sheet (also, it was the first time ever we had music sheets for our music, thanks to Arthur); it was a magical moment.

Yes, at first, it was a bit weird to leave a verse or chorus empty without adding too many textures or leads because we had to leave space for the vocals. But, as we’re mainly listening to music with vocals, it didn’t feel super complicated to actually switch to more vocal-driven music. CLOUD DRIFTER is, in a way, our vision of a modern pop record, filled with variety and different moods while being focused on keeping it cohesive. It feels almost like we were just super eager and excited to finally have vocals on our music as the instrumental sound was getting less and less attractive for us. As we’ve always tried to change and develop our sound with each record we’ve released, we wanted to keep this approach for CLOUD DRIFTER with more radical choices.

It’s a really good question. We tend to mix many influences, but in the end, it still sounds like l’Eclair. This has almost become like an unconscious act for us. We started composing with this approach in 2016 for our first E.P., Cruise Control, where we added some modern elements to the RAW Funk Sound, and we’ve been keeping up with this approach since then, so in a way, it’s natural now for us to blend genres and sounds because it’s an exercise we’ve always done and love doing. And because we’re kids of the internet era, it’s almost impossible for us to stick with one genre; it just doesn’t feel modern to us.

It’s an important duality for us because it shows the deepness of l’Eclair’s music. Even though something will make you dance or jump around, we always try to balance it with maybe nostalgic chords or spooky synthesisers. This duality drives us to explore more into our own sound & never be satisfied with what sounds obvious. It’s part of our will to make the audience think and mind travel while they’re listening to us. We want the audience to have their own interpretation of the song and not do all the work for them; this is why we strongly believe in this duality we’ve worked on for many, many years now.

Now that we’ve opened up a new door with the vocal-driven approach and orchestral instruments in CLOUD DRIFTER, we’re excited to pursue & explore many more future collaborations. So, people can expect l’Eclair to bring together more artists from different music worlds into their future records. And for our live shows, the party will never stop; people can expect even more dance floor bangers and psychedelic jams in our future public appearances.