Released February 14, 2026 as free digital download and in limited audio cassette edition.
Long before her work was fully seen, Leonora Carrington lived in the margins of Surrealism.
First eclipsed by the figure of Max Ernst, then displaced – geographically, symbolically – to Mexico, where her world finally began to unfold.
A world shared with other insurgent imaginations, among them Remedios Varo. A world stubborn, occult, fiercely lucid.
The Acoustic Cornet takes its title from Carrington’s dark, delirious novel.
A book that asks a dangerous question:
Do “disturbed” women disturb because they are mad or because they hear too much?
The story follows Marion Leatherby. Ninety-nine years old. Almost deaf. Living quietly in Mexico, knitting cat hair, listening to the world fade.
Until a gift arrives: an acoustic cornet.
A ridiculous object.
A revelation.
Through it, Marion overhears what was never meant to be heard.
Her family plotting her disappearance.
Her future sealed inside a retirement home where nothing is what it claims to be.
From there, reality fractures.
Women inhabit houses shaped like igloos, cakes, fantasies.
A false doctor presides like a guru.
A libidinous abbess watches from the shadows.
Architecture bends. Time slips. Staircases multiply.
The institution reveals itself as a cosmological trap.
This album does not retell the story.
It listens to it.
Philippe Petit approaches Carrington’s text as one would approach a signal coming from another frequency.
Fragments. Resonances. Distorted transmissions.
The acoustic cornet becomes a metaphor for listening itself: an instrument that amplifies what society prefers to keep inaudible.
Here, sound behaves like Carrington’s prose.
Absurd, ominous, playful, cruel.
A black farce. An initiation.
An Alice in Wonderland whose mirror opens onto the occult.
The music wanders through hidden corridors, riddles, vertiginous descents. It inhabits the space between lucidity and delirium, between laughter and menace. Nothing settles. Everything listens.
The Acoustic Cornet is not a tribute cast in bronze.
It is a continuation.
An echo.
An invitation to lean closer.
To hear what was always there.
And to accept that once you listen this way, there is no going back.
Composed and produced by Philippe Petit
Cover artwork by Iglika Kodjakova
