Nine years have passed without any Nocturne album being released. Total silence, apart from concerts and a few appearances on various compilations: no new production had emerged. Led by Saphi for over three decades now, Nocturne has never been set aside or put on hold. Quite the opposite. Studio work is a daily, relentless practice, without any interruption. In short, it is a discipline in its own right. Continuously pursuing a sonic and musical language constantly questioned through practice, concerts, and encounters, it has reached what one might call a form of culmination, though it is more accurately the logical continuation of a persistent body of work carried out over several decades. Here, there is no turning back: no need to look over one\u2019s shoulder. We are at the source of continuity, as can be heard across the thirteen tracks that make up this new album entitled HIVER MENTAL.<\/p>\n
The album, begun in 2018, was completed in December 2025: we are dealing with a long process in which nothing is left to chance. The tone is noise-based and openly hostile. \u201cPrecise, meticulous, surgical\u201d: this is how one might describe the core of the formula upon which the tracks are built. Short-form pieces \u2014 2 minutes for the shortest, never exceeding 4:30 \u2014 give the record a distinct rhythm. Yet it is not duration that matters here, but the intensity with which the pieces imprint themselves on the mind, like light on the retina. The tracks blend ambient and noise. Some compositions, more electronic in nature, combined with the highly precise manipulations of these noisers \u2014 homemade instruments \u2014 as well as spoken voices, generate, on certain pieces, a sense of extreme tension, of threat, provoking anxiety and unease, even a fear ready to collapse onto you like a brutal winter in a mild season.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing to hold onto\u201d: this is what comes to mind after listening to the record, along with a sense of violent helplessness toward oneself and toward a world constantly thrown back at us by the media, plunging us into inhibition, anxiety, and frustration. Some tracks, featuring texts such as Automne, Amerailleurs and Bienvenue, are marked by a deep dramatic melancholy: sound, voice, and hypnotic noise leave no space for escape. They freeze us in place and confront us in the mirror, in a ruthless mise en abyme of the unspeakable. Other ambient pieces, deceptively calmer, such as Tumulte, offer a brief respite from this feeling of suffocating, ever-present catastrophe ready to destroy everything. Noise-driven and hostile tracks (D\u00e9ferlement, Ecochaos, Partir, Tout doit dispara\u00eetre) depict a degraded world, damaged and destroyed by humankind, its way of life, its appetites, and its unrestrained violence. Here too, details, sounds, and machines are cut with a scalpel. The track Monitoring is slow-burning, more electronic and rhythmic: its repetitive motif, punctuated by bursts of noise, depicts a world where terror and mass surveillance are omnipresent. Fear is everywhere, all the time; there is no reprieve \u2014 a world in which dreaming is forbidden. Each track is a fragment of an image which itself sketches a larger picture, a panoramic snapshot, a wider tracking shot. Together, they reveal a shifting atmosphere, a ground beneath our feet giving way: walking itself has lost all certainty.<\/p>\n
Hiver Mental is first and foremost an image born in the intimacy of thought, where the first conflicts emerge before extending outward toward others. Nocturne offers a vision of the world as it is, without optimism, where death becomes almost secondary in the face of the silence of the living \u2014 it, at least, is real. To move through the shadows, to write one\u2019s name in earth, water, or air: nothing remains, and it is beautiful. Within this ephemerality lies something deeper than forgetting: the persistence of this void. Even within the poetics of emptiness, an escape still seems possible \u2014 but here there is none. The crisis has settled for good. There is no inside and no outside, no place left to shelter or protect oneself. The threat is everywhere and begins within.<\/p>\n
No more silence, no peace. It is over.
\nNocturne is an image of our time.<\/p>\n
Saphi 18 Avril 2026<\/p>\n
TRACKLIST:<\/p>\n
Automne
\nAmerailleurs
\nEcochaos
\nPartir
\nTout doit Disparaitre
\nTumulte
\nHiver
\nMonitoring
\nNoir! Noir! Noir!
\nBienvenue
\nFar Away
\nLa Vie – La Rage – La Mort<\/p>\n
Recording & Mastering at Studio Nuit janvier 2026<\/p>\n
TESCO 168<\/p>\n