For those not in the know, with Montréal’s FROTAE and its debut album Volume 2, out October 2nd, 2026 on Halocline Trance, nothing is as it seems.

For starters, the title is a blatant misnomer, given that it falls first in the group’s discography. Then there’s the manifesto-like acronym behind the name — it’s short for ‘For Reasons of Tone and Economy’.

Couple that with the album’s cover, its horizontally stretched serif font, and elusive, black-and-white artwork, and you might be forgiven for assuming this is some lost gem of industrial or dark ambient music from the 1990’s. It’s nothing of the sort, though.

To top it all off, while this entity is ostensibly a band, the group’s leader, acclaimed composer and pianist Liberté Anne, is nowhere to be found among their front-facing line-up!

Brushing all of these alluringly misleading surface impressions aside, FROTAE acts as a sort of incubator for Liberté Anne’s wondrous and unclassifiable compositional output. The body of work presented here on Volume 2 unfurls mostly patiently, offering enigmatic nods to jazz, the more pensive end of contemporary chamber music, and even certain traditional music.

From the perspective of technique, the group serves as an outlet for her to become immersed in spectral and microtonal approaches, while also exploring the particular dynamics of group playing and listening. The drive to delve into timbre and intonation isn’t merely aesthetic for Liberté Anne; it extends from her fundamental creative philosophy.

While she was exposed to tunings outside of equal temperament growing up through her Greek heritage, it wasn’t something she considered until late in her musical development (and it certainly was not a part of her training).

One critical bit of knowledge for her was the realization that many folkloric instruments were shoehorned into the strictures of 12-tone equal temperament in order to be compatible with Western musical idioms. FROTAE inverts this paradigm by adopting a core instrumentation built specifically for equal temperament — saxophones — and bending them into microtonal shapes. “I saw microtonality and timbre oriented orchestration as a way to get out of the metaphysical rigidity imposed by notions of what is “correct” (masculine) and what is “chaotic/incorrect” (feminine),” she reveals. “These are socially learned equivalences of which we know the root, but a big part of my own development as a person has been to analyze these and move through them with musical creation.”

1. Temper of the fields singing [05:47]
2. Cortège [11:09]
3. Long-Short [04:40]
4. Triangle-dot-line [04:22]
5. Mat’s Theme [03:15]
6. Chorale [06:24]
7. breth deth [02:43]

The much loved saxophone quintet - comprising some of Montréal’s most notable and adventurous players - together with the much-lauded Liberté Anne, open on the ornately sonorous, Celtic-imbibed, yet traditionally guided Temper of the fields singing and the simply gorgeous, and resolutely honed work of musical art Cortège, before next bringing us the playfully perky, jaunty and yet arresting at the same time Long-Short, the ethereally atmospheric, willowy gossamer of Triangle-dot-line, and the affectingly impassioned Mat’s Theme, the new set rounding out on the breathy ambiance of Chorale, coming to a close on the ornately inviting, affectingly celestial in its makeup breth deth.

Personnel:
Allison Burik: baritone; Geneviève Gauthier: alto; Philippe Lauzier: alto & soprano
Naomi McCarroll-Butler: tenor, Glissotar (tracks 1 & 3)
René Zeledon: tenor
Liberté-Anne Lymberiou: composition, artistic direction, producer

Official Purchase Link

www.liberteanne.com