adapted from the press release by Ben Hogwood

Back in 2006, the French label InFiné started stitching unlikely threads between classical music and club culture, laying early groundwork for what would come to be called “new-classical”, a “new” that felt hybrid and forward-looking rather than the narrower “neo.” The wager was simple: treat the studio like an instrument and let composition, production, and performance bleed into each other.

By early 2007, kindred spirits at Erased Tapes were formalizing a similar impulse in the UK, crystallizing experiments that had flickered across ECM releases and artists like Aphex Twin, Philip Glass, and Brian Eno. The vision also nods to Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist who famously embraced the studio’s power to do what the concert hall could not, a perfectionism that quietly rewired modern recording practice.

InFiné’s first catalog statement set the tone. Fresh from winning the Orléans International Piano Competition, Francesco Tristano recorded his first “non-classical” album for the sonic alchemy and folding in Autechre, Pascal Dusapin, Jeff Mills, and Tristano himself.

Two years later, in October 2008, the label staged a landmark at the Philharmonie de Paris: Detroit icon Carl Craig with the orchestra Les Siècles under François-Xavier Roth, Tristano’s arrangements, and the discreet touch of Berlin techno pioneer Moritz von Oswald — a bridge between symphonic muscle and machine pulse.

Since then, InFiné has kept walking that ridgeline with artists such as pianists Bruce Brubaker and Vanessa Wagner, cellist Gaspar Claus, percussionist Lucie Antunes, producers Rone, Arandel, Murcof, Labelle, and more recently Japan’s Kaito. In June 2021, Rone’s repertoire, arranged by Romain Allender, took over Lyon with a 90-piece orchestra and choir; the LOOPING project has since sold out philharmonic halls across France and Europe.

In 2019, the label launched a singular series with Paris’s Musée de la Musique, inviting contemporary musicians to “play” the museum’s historic instruments, not as relics, but as living tools. After albums devoted to Bach and to guitars, new chapters focused on harps and the oud are slated for 2025 and 2026. In 2024, InFiné also teamed with IRCAM on a program that fuses research and art: Murcof inaugurates the line with a 360° project spanning an album, ambisonic live performance, and soon, VR.

InFiné’s third and most recent collaboration with Musée de le Musique was for Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick’s upcoming project, continuing a shared mission to bridge historical instrumentation with contemporary innovation. “We were so lucky to have access to this experience. There was a lot of reverence, working with people with such warmth and enthusiasm, bringing these instruments into a modern context, literally taken off the shelves of the museum,” says Lattimore. “We wanted to honor the past while making music that we feel is a true expression of ourselves,” adds Barwick.

On October 10th, Vanessa Wagner released the Complete Piano Etudes of Philip Glass as a special 4-LP box set, a format that underscores its significance as a cornerstone for both the pianist and InFiné. Each Étude forms a distinct musical world, complete in itself. But heard as a whole, the cycle unfolds with remarkable depth: motifs and resonances weave through the pieces, revealing a vast emotional architecture where each work amplifies the others, enriching the collection’s overall meaning.

Nearly twenty years in, InFiné remains refreshingly uninterested in borders, geographic or stylistic. True to its roots yet restless by design, the label continues to operate as a laboratory where innovation serves listeners who like their music curious, porous, and resolutely modern. 

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Published post no.2,7067 – Monday 3 November 2025