Eve Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra

After the intense soundscapes developed by Eve Risser with White Desert Orchestra, the French composer and pianist is now broadening her scope to incorporate acknowledged influences from Malian music and her collaboration with the Kaladjula Band. With the reconfigured Red Desert Orchestra, whose debut album, Eurythmia, came out in 2022 on Clean Feed Records, she combines European and African instrumentalists to create a contagious sound built on polyrhythmic cycles that are sweetly trance-like and enchantingly melodic, multiplied by repetitions that are never quite the same. The result is a desert of tangled saxophones and balafons which Marc Corroto has described as “a hypnotic journey intensified by attacks of percussion and magnetic states”.