For Montreal composer, violinist, and pianist Ambre Ciel, the sea is more than a metaphor. It is a mirror, a force, and a way of existing that carries both grounding serenity and mysterious depth. Her debut album, still, there is the sea, released today, June 6, on UK label Gondwana Records, feels like an immersion in that element—at once vast and intimate, turbulent and serene.
“The album title came to me at the end of the creative process,” she says. “I realized the water element was a recurring theme—sometimes influencing the lyrics, but also the melody of the strings in the arrangements of a song, or the cyclic structure of an instrumental piece.” That elemental undercurrent became symbolic of the very process of making the album. “It also reflects what music represents to me; this access to an underworld that is vast, closer to the realm of dreams, and grounding at the same time—and this whole season of solitude in which I’ve been exploring the space in between both.”
Solitude, in fact, was integral. After years of musical collaboration and performance, Ambre retreated into a quiet Montreal apartment where, for the first time, she could truly hear silence. “Before moving to this apartment, I was renting a studio space in the Mile End and living close by. There was a lot of construction going on, and I felt that I needed to be able to hear silence in order to create this album,” she explains. “So I moved to a new apartment that had enough space for an acoustic piano and allowed me to experiment for long hours every day.”
That silence shaped more than the sound of the album—it shaped its emotional texture. “Hearing silence in Montreal is not always easy, and I’m grateful to have found this quiet apartment and to have had the mental space to create music,” she says. “It has probably influenced the emotional landscape of the album, in the sense that I’ve felt stillness there and, at the same time, had the freedom to explore musical ideas, knowing that no one could hear them.”
Though Ambre draws from a broad spectrum of influences—from Debussy to Thom Yorke—her sound is distinctly her own. “There are ways of approaching chord progressions, patterns, modality, and structure that I find inspiring in these composers, and these ideas energize me to explore and experiment,” she explains. “But all these different influences incubate on their own, and I tend to rely on intuition and discover along the way what the music wants to become.”
That sense of discovery plays out in the album’s seamless shifts between French and English, instrumental and vocal, pop and impressionism. “To me, it really depends on the melody,” she says. “In the album, I was hearing most of the vocal melodies in English, but there was one song called ‘Eau Miroir’ that sounded French to me.” Writing in a second language, as it turns out, offered unexpected creative freedom. “Writing lyrics is not something that comes as easily as music, but since English isn’t my native language, it helped me create some kind of distance and write more freely.”
Yet, still, there is the sea isn’t the realization of a polished dream. It is, as she describes, a “first and imperfect attempt” to render an inner world into sound. “I had a creative vision and carried some kind of ‘ideal state’ for every song and instrumental piece, as well as for the album as a whole,” she says. “Between composing music and having it fixed on a medium, I faced a world of the ‘not-yet achieved state’ while being guided by that ‘ideal state.’”
She struggled with the permanence of recorded music, a tension familiar to many artists. “My perception of the music evolved and was shaped by how many times I’ve been listening to the music. This inner world I was trying to bring to life is one of constant tension between aspiration and reality, between perfection and impermanence,” she says. “I’ve come to accept that the album has its own personality, and I feel attached to it. All this experience now makes me want to approach the next album with more playfulness.”
That playfulness has roots in her method as much as her mindset. Tracks like “the sun, the sky” and “fragment of” are built around circular structures, motifs that loop and resolve in quiet, hypnotic ways. “It started with the first four chords—they go somewhere and then return to their original point,” she explains. “I explored how this motif could evolve and saw different pathways for it, which led to ‘the sun, the sky’ and ‘fragment of.’ I liked how beginning the album with ‘the sun, the sky’ and ending it with ‘fragment of’ created a sense of circularity, as it starts and ends with the same four chords after a journey through the album.”
It’s not just structure that gives the record its distinct movement. There’s a physicality to her arrangements that breathes life into every note. “I wanted the elements—especially the strings—to have lots of space and to evolve under the same intention, like one gesture,” she says. “I started composing the string melodies and arrangements by improvising on the violin, so maybe that helped give a sense of aliveness, since it was anchored in physicality before becoming written music.”
The album features collaborations with musicians including Pietro Amato (as co-producer), Stefan Schneider, clarinetist Guillaume Bourque, and string players Marilou Lepage, Sebastian Gonzalez Mora, and Julien Siino. Owen Pallett assisted with orchestrations performed by the FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra, adding another layer of depth to the music’s already complex emotional topography.
As Ambre prepares to bring still, there is the sea to life onstage at Montreal’s International Jazz Festival on June 30, she also looks ahead to a major transition. Later this year, she will head to London for a residency at the Studio du Québec, courtesy of CALQ. “It comes at a moment where I feel like the space where I play music is tied to a lot of other associations,” she says. “So I’m sure it will probably lead me to approach creation in different ways than what I tend to do here.”
That openness to change, to letting place and silence and even language guide the music, is what defines Ambre Ciel’s work. “I’m also very grateful for the opportunity to discover the music scene there and find new inspirations,” she adds.
If this album is her first map of the inner landscape, it’s one made with humility and precision. With still, there is the sea, Ambre Ciel invites listeners into a space where stillness and motion coexist, where imperfections ripple into something quietly transcendent.
still, there is the sea is out now via Gondwana Records
Photos – Lawrence Fafard
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