• ARTIST: Charbonneau / Amato
• TITLE: Enflammer le désert
• CAT#: BKWRD035
• FORMAT: Digital
• RELEASE DATE: December 06, 2024

For many years now, Montreal’s Mathieu Charbonneau and Pietro Amato have been engaged in an unfolding musical dialogue. While the multi-instrumentalists, producers and composers have been acquainted since their school days, the electronic minimalism of 2018’s Synth Works Vol.1 and 2022’s Vol.2 marked their first recordings as a duo. The pair’s newest collaboration comes in the form of a commissioned soundtrack to Burning Man: enflammer le désert, a TV5 documentary series from Sarah Fortin exploring the 2023 edition of the cultural phenomenon. Joining forces on a soundtrack comes as a natural extension of their partnership, as both are accomplished score composers in their own right.

While distinct, Amato and Charbonneau’s paths have run parallel in many ways, and intersected at regular intervals. Both are graduates of Ottawa’s De La Salle high school, where they initially met, and Montreal's Concordia University where both studied music. They first teamed up as two-thirds of the instrumental trio Torngat, and later again with the group Ferriswheel. In the years that followed, as each turned their focus to other projects—Amato with Bell Orchestre and The Luyas, Charbonneau (a former Luya) with Avec pas d’casque, Organ Mood and Suuns—their trajectories would continue to mirror each other and overlap.

In their work as Charbonneau / Amato, the longtime collaborators distill their common musical language. Like its predecessors, Enflammer le désert is entirely self-produced, and largely recorded live; their modules and synths interconnected, responding to each other in real time. Though based on a given theme, the music was created independently from the documentary, prompted instead by their own conjured images. While the characteristic modular melodies of Synth Works remain central, the visual context is also reflected in more expansive, beat-driven soundscapes. In Enflammer le désert, the immersive sonic world the duo have come to be known for finds a counterpart in Black Rock Desert’s ephemeral metropolis.