Cécile Lacharme Announces Debut Album Dérives, Out Now via Bigo & Twigetti

French experimental cellist Cécile Lacharme steps fully into her own with Dérives, a striking debut album out today via Bigo & Twigetti — a transportive, immersive record that bends neoclassical composition, ambient textures and raw experimental instinct into something quietly radical. Alongside the album, Cécile also shares focus track “Fugue,” out now.

Years in the making, Dérives captures the singular live world Lacharme has built around solo cello, loopstation and effects pedals — a performance practice that folds together rock, indie-folk, electronic music and contemporary composition. Working alongside sound engineer Bastien Raute, her live sets have become known for their spatialised sound design, surrounding audiences in evolving layers where no two performances unfold the same way.

Translating that immersive physicality into a studio album presented a challenge — and ultimately shaped the record itself. Rather than traditional studio methods, Lacharme and Raute recorded Dérives inside Saint-Nazaire Theatre in France, using the space as an instrument in its own right and drawing on Dolby Atmos techniques to preserve the album’s expansive, three-dimensional quality.

“We wanted to keep consistency between the live performance and the album, so it was important for us to have this immersive feel starting from the recording process,” says Lacharme. “The main challenge came from the fact that I was the only musician, layering myself multiple times with the same instrument… we had to rework the arrangements while keeping in mind the placement of the different voices in space.”

The result is an album that feels vast yet intimate, meditative yet unsettled — and one threaded with political and ecological undercurrents. Taking its name from the French word for “drift,” Dérives reflects on instability in both the natural world and human systems, moving between turbulence and stillness, reverie and rupture.

“The album questions a world where political drift intertwines with ecological aberrations,” Lacharme explains. “It constantly oscillates between turmoil and calm, hope and resignation.”

Across nine instrumental pieces — from the spiralling tension of “Fugue” to the elemental pull of “Élégie Glaciaire” — Dérives unfolds as both sonic landscape and quiet act of resistance, marking Lacharme as a singular voice operating beyond convention.

Classically trained but resolutely exploratory, Lacharme has spent recent years carving out a unique practice through collaborations across Europe and Asia, while drawing inspiration from minimalism, improvisation and experimental songwriting. With Dérives, those threads coalesce into a debut of rare depth and atmosphere.

Dérives is out now on all streaming platforms via Bigo & Twigetti.