The flautist Delphine Joussein is a member of the French electro jazz sextet Asynchrone, whose Plastic Bamboo in the fall of 2023 reimagined the repertoire of Ryuichi Sakamoto, plus the unconventional trio NOUT which is comprised of Joussein’s flute with Rafaelle Rinaudo on the electric harp and Blanche Lafuente on percussion. Hailed as some kind of missing link between Nirvana and Sun Ra, they released their debut extended play in the fall of 2021 and followed that up in the spring of 2024 with a live set entitled simply or brusquely Live Album.
On that compendium, which was culled from a series of performances across European venues and music festivals, Joussein renewed her working partnership with the Swedish free jazz heavyweight Mats Gustafsson, having previously performed with his Fire! Orchestra before Gustafsson ascended the stage in the South Tyrolean city of Bolzano and bolted his hefty baritone saxophone onto ‘The Last Train’, ‘Ça sent le brûlé’ and ‘Noutsson’ which would become the last three tracks of Live Album.
Gustafsson plays all manner of wind instruments from the slide whistle to the baritone saxophone but as the name suggests the debut album by Flöjter – this new and steeply invigorating tandem of Joussein and Gustafsson – focuses on the flute, with the duo’s winds abutting or abrading but rarely staying at arm’s length as they are complemented by some percussive gestures and electronic processing. Sinuously titled Paris Blow the heading in fact refers to their meeting place rather than the landscapes evoked within as Paris Blow was captured live on 15 October 2025 at La Dynamo de Banlieues Bleues in Paris.
Paris Blow finds Joussein and Gustafsson utilising almost every kind of extended flute technique including jet whistles at every angle of ascent or descent and an almost constant barrage of air sounds, plus some key clicks or slaps, the odd tongue ram and some flutter-tonguing. The opening piece of four extended improvisations emphasises the rhythmic stops and pulsating whorls of circular breathing before the duo engage in a few lofty shrieks and passages which at first seem to possess the limpid wetness and plunking onomatopoeia of skipping stones but then hollow out to become will-o’-the-wisps, sylvan but decidedly wispy or spectral.
At times especially through Gustafsson’s muffled splutter and growls it sounds like their flutes have turned to rubber and they are collectively engaged in the task of wringing the necks of their instruments. A few vocalisations emerge in spiky and staccato fashion, showing the influence of punk and mucking in with some harsh whipping chords of electric.
Then a throbbing drone offers yet another perspective on the track’s title ‘Souffler sur les braises’ – which translates to ‘Blowing on the Embers’ – as the sense of a siren alarm evokes the calamitous and collapsible image of a nuclear reactor nearing meltdown or an oil rig teetering on its last legs. A harrowing whistle summons up some horror film dread and reaches a climax amid lurching electronics, whose whipping cords and engine revs suggest a noirish B movie or the genre stylings and diegetic maw of David Lynch. Finally on ‘Souffler sur les braises’ the desperate, high-pitched gropes and splurts of the two flautists are submerged by a barrelling wall of dank noise and static.
‘Solid Silver Tube’ opens with a more whimsical, even somewhat rickety melody, a kind of makeshift arabesque as that barrelling menace continues to lurk in the background, though only for the first thirty seconds of the piece. When it reemerges it is somewhat less distorted, a more tangible air sound redolent of a wind tunnel or some big-lunged fiend sucking up a straight beverage through a gigantic straw. As they are gradually accompanied by a few rattles and shakers, these sputtering gusts of sound encounter obstacles or get caught up in the air turbulence and form eddies, coiled and sweeping, sometimes suggesting a slide whistle while carrying all of the momentum of a theme park loop-the-loop.
Yet before the midpoint of the piece these disparate strands bed down and take on steadier rhythm, first like a stream train chugging down the line then more meditative with the sinuosity or slender ritual of a shakuhachi or even the viscosity of a shō. Soon the duo deliver a kind of screed through processed vocals whose meaning is hard to discern, though the effect lands somewhere between a guerrilla radio broadcast and some runaway artificial intelligence which is asserting in a gibberish language its newfound sense of control.
As it jabbers away it calls to mind the drone and vocalisations of a didgeridoo, big belching combinations of voice and electronics smothering the flute. This sense of disordered and rapacious technology coheres for a good chunk of what follows, more in the vein of aeronautics or aerial drones as Paris Blow briefly conjures up something of the Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek album New Future City Radio while more broadly sharing an ethos with Tatsuya Yoshida and Martín Escalante’s standout The Sound of Raspberry which was released last year.
Then suddenly ‘Solid Silver Tube’ morphs or separates into its component parts, like a big grey cumulonimbus cloud releasing thick droplets of water, at first with the limpidity of plucked tines as though from a mbira then more abruptly dramatic like a thunderstorm unleashing big globules which swiftly submerge the scene. The rest of ‘Solid Silver Tube’ plays out under water, through bathtub atmospherics which suggest a muffle mbira, drenched mallet percussion or the treble side of the tabla. Finally we rush back through the wind tunnel for an outro equal to the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, replete here with alien vocalisations as Flöjter make sure never to stay in any one place for too long.
By contrast ‘Projected. Stream of Mind.’ is more woodsy, two birds encircling one another in flight. There is the misty or vetivery aroma of panpipes as the electronics come to a boil, some shapeshifting oscillations which suggest a woozy hall of mirrors and more haunted house effects, plus some slightly frantic vocalisations, once more thickly processed, which attain a ritual or prayer-like quality like a kundalini awakening or some other form of speaking in tongues before the duo proceed or recede to a game of alien warfare or Space Invaders.
At times those Andean exhortations recur as the twin flutes call to mind quenas or sikus and their attendant drones. And indeed ‘Projected. Steam of Mind.’ repeatedly succeeds in splitting the difference between those two worlds or zones, with folk themes and handmade objects in wood or ceramic lingering in somewhat humble and plaintive fashion beneath alien goadings and a smoke-filled or sagging sky. If these modes can be resolved or reconciled in any way then Joussein and Gustafsson seem to stumble across some form of resolution through the image of a towering and mechanistic feline or canine, which pants through the shrugging electronics and licks at its metallic lips.
Paris Blow is certainly one of the more roving, restless and abrasive sets to start the year. The opening moments of ‘Flutes. Still Breathing.’ offer a slither of urbanity, as though the duo were tuning up or attending a small recital, before they again scale Andean summits, high-pitched and urgent as their breaths and key presses produce shorter pulses and sputtering growls. The result here on the closing piece of the album even sounds bombastic, with sections of overblowing and smaller vibrations which string together like muted plucks of guitar, before a choppy legs-akimbo blur of pulses and drones and grunting or nattering vocalisations draws the curtain, not fateful or menacing now but garrulous as Joussein and Gustafsson revel in their own sense of fun.
