As news reaches us about the ongoing decline of corals on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, we move to the other side of the globe to the Mascarenes, a small group of islands in the Indian Ocean, consisting of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues. A native of La Réunion, French producer Sébastien Lejeune, aka Loya, has spent the past years researching his own cultural heritage as well as the music he grew up listening to before moving to metropolitan France in the mid-90s. It was there that he first encountered electronic music from artists the likes of Autechre or Boards of Canada.
Loya soon began to create his own music, "drawing from Intelligent Dance Music [IDM] and bleep techno to build complex rhythm arrangements and ethereal melodies [as he] gradually managed to tame the erratic nature of his machines to summon states of trance [and eventually] developed a trademark sound based on triple time beats, pointillist sound design and a taste for experimentation." He released his first self-produced album "Eruption" in 2014 and followed that up in 2016 with his "Indian Ocean" EP.
Last September Loya unveiled his latest full-length "Corail" on Paris-based imprint Mawimbi Records and it is as just as beautiful as its namesake. On "Corail" Loya establishes "a fine balance between the soft, velvety ripples of modular synthesizers, the rawness of frantic percussion motifs and local field recordings". While exploring the sounds of his native archipelago, he produces "a myriad of sounds" both electronic and natural that are nothing short of breathtaking and recently inspired a stellar remix album.