Jacques Berchten

In a world saturated with algorithmic predictability and digital gloss, Jacques Berchten’s Existrances Vol. I emerges as a defiantly analog, deeply personal artifact. Berchten, a Lausanne-based autodidact whose creative life spans over four decades, approaches sound as a painter approaches canvas—layering, erasing, and reimagining the boundaries between disciplines. Existrances is not merely an album, but a “project-symbiosis,” a living dialogue between painting, music, and poetry.

The record unfolds in two extended pieces, each occupying a side of vinyl, clocking in at just over 15 and 14 minutes respectively. These are not tracks in the conventional sense, but immersive environments—formless, hypnotic, and otherworldly. Berchten’s palette is a blend of acoustic and electronic sources, their origins often obscured, their textures shifting like light across a studio wall. The result is a music that resists easy categorization: at times meditative, at others unsettling, always inviting the listener to inhabit its liminal spaces.

Berchten’s background as a painter and poet is palpable throughout. The album’s structure feels less like a narrative and more like a series of abstract gestures, each inviting interpretation. There is a sense of ritual, of trance, as if the music is both documenting and inducing a state of altered consciousness. This is reinforced by the project’s history—Existrances was invited to the Avant-Garde Festival in 2019 by Jean-Hervé Péron of Faust, a nod to its place within the lineage of European experimentalism.

Existrances Vol. I is a rare thing: a record that feels both timeless and utterly of its moment, a testament to the enduring power of self-taught visionaries to carve out new spaces for listening and being. In Berchten’s hands, sound becomes a site of possibility—a place where art, music, and poetry dissolve into one another, and where the act of listening becomes an act of existential inquiry.