Puce Moment’s "Sans Soleil" is a ghost ritual set to tape, stitched from the lacquered past of Japanese court music and the modular squelch of modern electronics. The duo - Nicolas Devos and Pénélope Michel - doesn’t simply blend Gagaku with synths. No. They dissolve time, steep it in a theremin-tinged broth, and serve it as a steaming bowl of sonic ambiguity.

Gagaku, with its roots sunk deep in the 5th century, normally floats in imperial stillness. But here, it mutates. The sho wheezes like a haunted accordion in a dream, the hichiriki cries from a misty void, and somewhere in the shadows, a SH-101 sips tea with a Jen SX1000. The result is music that’s neither past nor present - just pure presence. Think “court music for deities on ketamine”.

Each track is a different spell. "Kangen" hums like a Buddhist AM radio lost in a thunderstorm. "Batu" unravels itself slowly, a procession of sounds where order collapses with the grace of falling sakura. "Sho" might be the quietest riot you’ll ever hear - a celebration of restraint so tense it feels like your bones are humming. And "Bugaku", which once might have scored elegant dances, now limps, stumbles, reconfigures - like choreography invented mid-apocalypse.

There is chaos, yes, but it’s reverent. The electronics don’t mock tradition - they court it, they court it clumsily and beautifully, like someone trying to waltz with a ghost. Sometimes the past leans in. Sometimes it pulls away.

Behind it all: the duo’s taste for fictional ethnology, sonic ceremony, and the uncomfortable beauty of contamination. Not collage, but conversation. Not pastiche, but possession.

And if this is a séance, then "Sans Soleil" is the flickering candle. A brief and gorgeous tremble between what was and what might be.