A mirage in sound

It wasn’t supposed to be an album. Montréal-based pianist Blais – whose work blurs the line between classical tradition and modern minimalism – had just finished a West Coast tour. Somogyi, the Los Angeles harpist known for pushing her instrument into experimental territory, invited him to Joshua Tree for a few days. No pressure. No plans. Just music.

“The first time I met you, I drove here the next day and that’s when we recorded the album, right?” Blais says to Somogyi. They’re sat in her home studio once again, practicing for a very special performance of the album out in the open air of Joshua Tree just days before désert is released. “It all just happened. So when we met up in London again in the summer last year, we had already made it, but we didn’t even think about it as an album. It was just an encounter—just an improv. They recorded it. None of us thought it could be anything.”

Somogyi nods. “We had just forgotten about it. I think at that time, the music was there—it just hadn’t been, you know, sort of procured into, like, ‘this is an album.’ It was just hours of us playing together.”

Months passed before they listened back. When they did, it was Cyrus Reynolds—Somogyi’s husband, a producer and composer—who heard something they hadn’t: “Cyrus was like, ‘Guys, I think you have an album.’ And we looked at each other like, really? But the thing is, the music didn’t change. The only thing that changed was how we saw it.”

What they had captured was something vast, meditative, and untamed. It felt less composed than discovered, less played than conjured. Like the desert itself, it was both there and not there, a mirage that flickered in and out of existence. The result is a completely immersive sonic mission. Calming but charged, Blais and Somogyi’s musical conversation is an experience so hypnotising it’s hard to even focus on.

“Sometimes, I really struggle to listen back through music I’ve made,” mentions Blais. “On my last album I couldn’t get to the end of it without falling asleep. No matter how many times I tried, I’d never make it.”

Improvisation is a dangerous thing. It demands trust, demands that a musician relinquish control, step off the edge of familiarity, and play without knowing where they’ll land. Most improvisations disappear as soon as they’re played—but désert refused to vanish.

“It wasn’t written down,” Somogyi says. “It was all very momentary, extremely of the exact moment that we were playing together. There was no thought behind any of the compositions, other than just pure feeling.”

Blais, who has spent years balancing between classical rigor and freeform spontaneity, understood the fragility of what they’d captured. “There’s moments where suddenly the magic happened. You both arrive with something new at the same time that fits together, and you don’t even know how,” he says. “I think “Révérence” has that—suddenly, there’s this clear melody coming out of nowhere, and chords unfolding, like, how is this even possible?”

That feeling—of something forming itself in real-time, unburdened by expectation—made the session unique. “It was really out of body,” Blais continues. “I was comparing it to a first date. Sometimes there’s a magic happening—you discover the other person, find a place where you can exchange, and it just works.”

Unlike a first date, however, désert was never meant to lead to anything more. The music existed for a single evening, and then it was gone. It wasn’t until later that they realised they had left a trace of something rare. “Honestly, even you asking questions about it is helping us realise what happened,” he laughs. “It really was something so organic and out of body, so I apologise if our answers sound unrefined.”

Improvisation isn’t just about playing notes—it’s about listening. It’s about intuition, about learning another person’s musical language in real-time, about sensing where they might go before they even go there. “It felt like we were having a conversation without words,” Somogyi says. “I would say something, and then you would answer.”

Blais nods. “You feel it in your body when the music locks in. It’s like your entire nervous system is in sync with someone else’s.”

They weren’t thinking in terms of melody or harmony. They weren’t analyzing form. They weren’t even sure what they were making. It was pure instinct.

“I don’t think we were present, you know what I mean?” Somogyi says. “I don’t think we were thinking harmonically. I think it was all purely just by feeling. At least that’s where I was. I was just playing, and I was listening, and we were conversating and having trust in each other’s musical language.I don’t know, I don’t really recall too much.”

She smiles. “There were times when we both looked up at each other, mid-playing, and it was like—‘Oh. We’re really in it now.’” And then, just as quickly, they would disappear back into the sound.

“There’s moments where suddenly, you both land exactly where you’re supposed to,” Blais continues. “And you don’t want to mess it up, because you can’t stop and redo it. That moment is the only take you’ll get.”

Albums usually follow a script. Even the most experimental records are often shaped by some preconceived structure—a theme, a sonic palette, a set of ideas that guide the process. But désert was different. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t even acknowledged as an album until long after it was recorded.

“We sat and we played in a sound box for two hours—how can that be valuable?” Blais asks. “How can that be brought up to the world, saying, ‘This is worth something?’”

In a world where music is polished, refined, and endlessly revised, désert challenges the idea that creation needs intention to have meaning. It asks a simple but radical question: What if music just is? Somogyi expands on this idea: “It’s a snapshot in time, which I think is why I find the improv so special. Even trying to replicate it now, it’s different, because it’s not the same moment anymore.”

Rehearsing for the live performances of désert has made that even clearer. “We’re learning the music as if we’re covering someone else’s songs," she says. "Except that ‘someone’ is us, just in a different moment in time."

Joshua Tree is a place where people go to get lost. The landscape stretches outward in every direction, barren yet full of life, an expanse of sand, rock, and sky that distorts time. It’s a place that resists containment, and for Blais and Somogyi, it became more than just a setting—it became part of the music itself.

“The studio is surrounded by the desert,” Blais says. “That’s what you’re hearing—this openness, this vastness.” He turns our camera to the window they’ve been facing throughout our conversation and reveals the never-ending desert at their doorstep. Instantly, it becomes clearer how the unique relationship between the artists and their situation impacted the sensory identity of this record.

Somogyi describes the way the environment seeped into their playing. “The expansiveness and the sort of free feeling was, you know, it’s inspiring.” She motions outward, tracing an invisible horizon. “And I think that is reflected very much in this. Because again, there were no limits placed on what we were doing. It felt very free, there wasn’t any heaviness, there was nothing that was restrictive at all.”

Blais nods. “It had just rained, and the smell of the desert after rain—it’s like nothing else. That’s in the record too.”

But Joshua Tree is not just about stillness. Beneath the beauty, there’s unpredictability, a quiet kind of danger. “Yesterday, I was scared to go back to my Airbnb alone because there were coyotes outside,” Blais says. “The desert is wild. Beautiful, but wild.”

That duality—openness and danger, calm and wildness—shaped désert in ways they couldn’t anticipate. “Coyotes, scorpions, rattlesnakes—it’s soft, it’s beautiful, but it’s wild,” Blais adds. “And the music? It’s the same.”

Even the way the record unfolds mirrors the rhythm of the desert. “The album moves from dawn to dusk,” adds Somogyi. “It awakens, and then it falls asleep.” A natural cycle, unforced. Just like the music itself.

To name something is to define it—to give it an identity, a boundary, a purpose. But désert resists definition. The word itself carries multiple meanings: a barren landscape, an emptiness, a place of exile. But in French, Blais’ mother tongue, désert also suggests something abandoned, something left behind.

“I think désert is less about a physical place and more about a state of mind,” Somogyi reflects. “It’s about vastness. About letting things unfold in their own time.”

Even now, as they prepare to perform désert live, it remains something just out of reach. “We can’t recreate it exactly. And maybe that’s the point,” Somogyi tells me. There’s a quiet irony in how désert came to be—an album that wasn’t an album, music that wasn’t meant to be heard, a collection of improvisations that refused to disappear. It exists because it happened. And that’s enough.

Improvisation is an act of surrender. There is no safety net, no second take, no rewriting. It forces musicians to trust—not only in their own instincts but in each other. For Blais and Somogyi – two artists who’ve won JUNO awards, collaborated with Hans Zimmer, and earned a world-renowned pedigree – désert was about more than making music, it was about relinquishing control.

“You have to trust that the music will find its way,” Blais says. “The first take is often the best one. Because by the second or third, you’re thinking too much.” But that trust didn’t come without risk. “I used to do 25 takes of a piece in the studio, trying to ‘perfect’ it,” Blais admits. “But perfection kills the magic.”

For decades, ambient music has existed in a strange paradox. It demands no attention, yet it profoundly shapes the space around it. It can be background or foreground, a meditation or a distraction. Désert finds itself sitting comfortably in that paradox—a record that doesn’t insist on being listened to but still transforms the room when played.

“Music doesn’t have to demand attention to be meaningful,” Blais says. “It can exist in the background and still shape an experience.”

Somogyi agrees, seeing désert as something that lives between presence and absence. “Some people will actively listen to it. Others will let it wash over them. Both are valid.”

The idea isn’t new—Eric Satie famously created what he called furniture music, designed to blend into the atmosphere rather than command focus. “He would go into cafés in France and play, and he’d literally ask people to keep talking over him,” Blais says. “He had to fight for people to understand that music could be just something.”

For some, that may make désert meditative. For others, it may make it something more abstract, something undefined. “I think you can only meet things, people, experiences where you’ve met yourself,” Somogyi reflects. “Whatever a person is experiencing, that’s what this music will bring.”