The World is Stable Now

LP, DIGITAL 16th oct, 2026

Floating guitars, slowed-down tapes, abused cassettes, accidental sounds left intact, friends improvising, and tracks that sometimes seem to have been recorded in a slightly bizarre dream. Luminous music permeated by the world’s anxieties, Brutalist monuments, Myasaki... music that prefers to take the road less traveled rather than knowing exactly where it’s going.
It might not quite resemble what you’d imagine a Cheptel record to be. But deep down, the music we love always ends up intersecting somewhere.
We’re 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 about the idea of releasing this strange and magnificent record by Louis Matute.

Unveiling at the same time the artwork by Spanish artist Josune Dega

In a handful of records and barely more years, the Sion-born guitarist has established himself as one of the truest promises of a tomorrow that swings differently. Ranging across the fretboard with a deft touch, he plugged into the open-minded local scene, which gradually drew him away from the mainstream and towards a truant soundtrack in the image of Geneva's ecosystem — squats and more experimental ventures, a city of immigration and sounds from elsewhere. All of which comes through in Our Folklore, an album that set him apart from the pack back in 2022, and then, two years later, in Small Variations From The Previous Day, with guests including Gabi Hartman in samba-jazz mode and Brandee Younger in carioca colours. He leans towards Latin America once more with Dolce Vita, a collection with autobiographical contours from a musician whose family roots are anchored in Honduras.

There is no question, however, of reducing his music to a single field of investigation, however vast. He asserts himself as a composer, honing a body of themes that resists calibrated definitions and a sensitive writing marked by finely tuned melodies. It is with that same ear that the guitarist chooses to lead projects alongside the Large Ensemble, his regular band on the jazz front, so as to give free rein to an expression bound by no style or formula. Those same qualities are at work again on this new record, even if it rests on thematic ideas jotted down in a small notebook over two afternoons. "I wanted to write as little as possible, to leave room for the production, for finding textures, sound choices…" the guitarist confides. Hence, for these sessions, the five-day laboratory he set up, open to all his friends but built on a core of Robin Girod, bassist and sound engineer, his regular pianist Andrew Audiger and percussionist Valentin Liechti. The upshot: no arrangement decisions, only parts improvised in the moment.

What strikes you straight away is the presence of the guitar, acoustic as much as eclectic, which appears in the foreground and braids delicate arpeggios while weaving links with electronic sounds, a few pads and sparse percussion. Hello, ambient! And yet there is not a single overdub behind this classy carpet, which is what lets his subtle strings take flight. Every version was recorded from A to Z, putting the emphasis on in-situ improvisation. They are simply sublimated by meticulous work on the sound, according to a well-established protocol. "Everything was run through an old Tascam tape machine, then pitched down and recorded to cassette, and after that sent back into the Pro Tools session…" The result should surprise more than a few, so far does it step outside his usual grid — or does it? — to shape an original score you can imagine conceived for the screen: wide open spaces à la Jarmusch, Lynch-like strangeness, echoes of Hans Zimmer between the lines too. And while the guitar is certainly audible, there is still no question of Louis Matute playing the heroic-fantasy card. The ego trip isn't his thing.

In the same way, and in contrast with the apparent elegance of his music, the choice of the ten tracks conveys a very real disquiet about the state of the world today. For this, the guitarist drew on his reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the story of an emperor who sends Marco Polo out to draw up an inventory of the great cities of the world, to learn how societies organise themselves. "Each city has a woman's name, each cultivates its own differences, organisational as much as architectural, and all of them carry issues that resonate with our own times." As for the album title, The World Is Stable Now, it refers to a SAMO tag — the acronym for "SAMe Old shit" with which Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz flooded the walls of downtown New York in the late 1970s — and still more to a line from Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's quasi-dystopian novel whose relevance proves premonitory nearly a century later.

Into Louis Matute's fingers and voice slips a touch of irony not unlike that of his other album, How Great This World Can Be. Positive but pessimistic by his own admission, dark by nature yet the bearer of luminous music, this musician cultivates his paradoxes — much like the cover he chose for the album: abstract, colourful faces by a Mexican artist, a strange tone entirely in keeping with the flashes of soul of a man who describes himself as nostalgic and made anxious by technology, without giving up on handling it sparingly. No, decidedly, it seems futile to file this musician under any one category, be it jazz or its Latin variants. And that, without a doubt, is what makes this record so valuable, opening up fresh perspectives for a musician who fully intends not to stay fixed on futile certainties. For isn't the future promised to the most adventurous, those capable of putting back into play what others take as truths carved in marble?