With The Soundtrack to Aurélie Muller’s Imaginary Film, Vilain Tigre has created a unique work that straddles the line between music and mental cinema. Conceived as the soundtrack to a film without images, the album unfolds across three EPs and an epilogue, a fragmented, evolving form that gives everyone the freedom to craft their own narrative.

 

EP I marks the first chapter of this imaginary soundtrack. Conceived as an overture, it brings together three tracks that set the scene for the first sequence of the inner film, blending instrumental music, songs and sounds of the real world.

 

The record opens with ‘La Trajectoire’, an instrumental piece carried by ethereal choirs and a saxophone in voice-over. Like a wide-angle opening sequence, it invites the mind to wander and gradually drift into reverie. With ‘Retour, Accès, Rebond’, the voice of Daniel Offermann (Girls In Hawaii, TRESOR) emerges from off-screen. The lyrics oscillate between reconstructed memories and projected expectations, capturing that pivotal moment where rational thought attempts to come to terms with the irrational. ‘Ici’ then takes the form of a unsettling inner dialogue: the interplay between a natural voice and a subtly pitch-shifted one questions the impact of details and the way they shape our perception when we dwell on them.

 

Between warm textures, restrained melancholy and introspection, this first episode establishes a world that is both welcoming and unsettling, where music becomes a space for projection. An invitation to close your eyes and let the film begin.

 

Following this luminous first chapter, EP II, conceived as a second sequence, explores the fragile moment when something shifts: an encounter, a quest, a foretold rain.

 

‘La Rencontre’ opens this new movement. An ethereal instrumental with suspended vocals, the track evokes a journey with the windows open, the wind on one’s face, the heart touched by a gentle nostalgia yet turned towards the future. A scene in motion, a tracking shot where one moves forward without knowing exactly what lies ahead, with a quiet confidence. The music unfolds here, expansive and breathing, like a wide shot before a close-up.

 

With ‘Looking For You’ (a cover of Nino Ferrer), Vilain Tigre revisits a lesser-known track from the artist’s repertoire. Whereas the original version conveyed an almost obsessive quest, this interpretation shifts the centre of gravity: the search becomes an inner one. We are no longer simply searching for someone, but for what we project. The voice creates a contemplative space, as if absence were becoming a landscape.

 

‘It’s Gonna Rain’ shifts the EP to another side. Sounds of water, the creaking of boats, a damp and slow-moving atmosphere: the rain arrives without threat; it transforms. The track evokes a journey tinged with a quiet melancholy, on the cusp of a reflection or an enigmatic landscape. Everything seems suspended: time, movement, breathing, as if on the threshold of a metamorphosis. Yet a serenity emerges from it, and the rain becomes a passage. The lyrics then question shared emotions: can we feel exactly the same thing at the same moment?

 

With EP III, Vilain Tigre unveils the third chapter of this imaginary soundtrack. Following the luminous landscapes of the early days, this new instalment plunges into a nocturnal and introspective atmosphere. Three tracks, like three scenes where the external world gradually fades away in favour of the intimate.

 

‘Deep Night’ opens the sequence with movement. A dry snare drum imposes a relentless march, whilst trains hurtling at full speed cross the soundscape. The night thickens as the music progresses. We no longer know whether we are crossing through the darkness or entering it, as if into a tunnel, that of the night, or perhaps that of the mind.

 

With ‘Le Port’, the film slows to a halt. Fenders brush against the hulls; the boats breathe gently against the quay. All is calm, almost motionless. Little by little, the setting fades away to become an interior. The track captures this suspended moment where one holds one’s breath without realising it, where the outside world disappears and where every second seems to stretch out.

 

‘Sont mieux dans ma tête’ then shifts the perspective. A phrase returns, repeats itself, shifts. Time, people, moments, everything sometimes seems more beautiful in the imagination than in reality. The repetition acts like an insistent thought, a recurring memory, an attempt to give this inner world as much value as the real world, perhaps even more.

 

With this third instalment, Vilain Tigre continues to build its soundtrack: a sequence where each track becomes a self-contained scene and where the listener takes full part in the narrative. Night falls, eyes light up, the film continues.

 

The epilogue brings this journey to a close. As the final scene of this imaginary film, it serves both as an ending and as a beginning.

 

‘Bye’, carried by a wind ensemble, rises like a breath. Voices circulate, brass and woodwinds echo one another, as if the air itself were becoming a vessel of memory, that of his father, ever-present in the background of his music. A way of saying goodbye without stagnation. By imagining the free soul traversing invisible landscapes that connect the living to those who came before them, mourning becomes a path that is both mysterious and soothing.

 

Nothing mystical, just a profoundly human intuition: that bonds continue to flow, in the air, in movement, in memory.

 

In this final chapter, the imaginary film of Vilain Tigre does not really come to an end. It drifts gently away, continuing its journey towards another place.