La Tène

Active between French-speaking Switzerland and France, the trio La Tène has been developing since the mid-2010s an instrumental music that sits between European folk, minimal repetition and experimental sound research. La Tène draws on rural dance repertoires, notably from mountain regions, extracting short motifs that are replayed continuously until an acoustic trance is established. The group combines percussion, strings and harmonic drones within long-form structures in which a steady rhythmic pulse remains foregrounded while textures evolve through micro-variations. This approach, on the borderline of traditional music and the avant-garde, was consolidated on the album “Vouerca/Fahy” (2016) and further on “Tardive/Issime” (2017), both of which continue the same exploration of repetition, tension and the gradual wearing of motifs. Present on stages that mix experimental, folk and world music, La Tène is part of a European network of collective projects where oral transmission, improvisation and composition intersect without a strict hierarchy, while retaining an immediately recognisable sonic identity.