Recording sessions filmed at the legendary Château d’Hérouville

Music composed, arranged and directed by Fred Palem

Casting:

Fred Pallem : direction artistique, bass, guitar

Vincent Taeger : drums & percussions

Guillaume Lantonnet : percussions

Guillaume Magne : guitar

Sébastien Palis : clavinet, organ

Rémi Sciuto : flutes, sax baryton & sopranino

Christine Roch : sax tenor & clarinette basse

Sylvain Bardiau : trumpet, bugle

Daniel Zimmerman : trombone

Anne Le Pape : violin

Aurélie Branger : violin

Séverine Morfin : alto

Michèle Pierre : cello

« Why compose a new album? Because I couldn’t do anything else, explains Fred Pallem. If I could release six per year, I would”. 

This passion for music made by musicians finds its place on “X” (the tenth), designed with a stubborn resistance to the desire to do less, with fewer people. While the career of Le Sacre du Tympan began more than two decades ago, this album brandishes its difference in a perilous exercise: writing each title like a potential hit, where each instrument has its theme, has its gimmick.

Fred Pallem realizes here his tenth work with Le Sacre du Tympan.

Goodbye Lougarock – where Guillaume Magne’s stratocaster sparkles – is dedicated to Fred Pallem’s father, who left in January 2020; Bitches en Marbella evokes the release of successive confinements; in “L’Amour du Disque”, the composer tells the joy he found in writing this tenth album for Le Sacre. Far from being outdated, « X » above all recalls the very current mission of Le Sacre du Tympan: to put orchestral music back on the map, like a strange impossible place where Wagnerian flights would intersect with the groove of David Axelrod’s basses and the madness of Jean-Claude Vannier.

Not to mention passing the baton, « X » is perhaps the sign that Fred Pallem and his sidekicks have been writing for more than two decades the scores of a mine of samples where artists like Madlib or Danger Mouse could come and pick up bits of groove and rhythmic joys baked in the sun. This is precisely what makes this tenth album « X » a more playful long-format than the previous one, and to be listened to like a tanning cream for the ears, far from concepts.