Pierre Lefeuvre. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

It took Parisian Pierre Lefeuvre four years to create Mirage, the third album for his Saycet project following One Day at Home in 2005 and Through the Window in 2010. Four years, during which he was finally able to devote all his time to music, including multiple collaborations with the Pompidou Centre and France Culture, and a live tour that took him as far as Asia and Russia.

"I wanted to make a much more elegant, more frontal record, something less convoluted," said Lefeuvre.

While embellishing his compositions for the previous tour, Pierre Lefeuvre realised how much pleasure he took in thickening out his basslines and pushing the beats further to the front of the mix.

Mirage includes ten tracks in movement, floating somewhere between abstract pop, baroque electronica and luminous techno. For the five vocal tracks on the album, Pierre once again worked with Phoene Somsavath, the singer from his previous album who wrote her own lyrics and most of the melodies. Together, they constructed these melancholic nursery rhymes by wilfully giving them a tinge of pop.

"It's the melody that became a pretext for the arrangement, whereas before the opposite was true. Before, I was happy under the umbrella of the electronica movement, but now I try less to stay in the mould," says Lefeuvre.

The album kicks off with Ayrton Senna - harmonic, interlacing minimalist cells in a criss-cross crescendo that eventually melds them together. Lefeuvre still remembers being in front of his TV that Sunday in 1994 when the Formula 1 pilot's death was broadcast live. The violence of the scene and ensuing emotional shock were a sort of symbol for the passage from childhood to manhood.