Cradled in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, off Canada’s Atlantic coast, Prince Edward Island and the windswept Magdalen Islands are home to a small but thriving Francophone Acadian community recognized for its distinctive French dialect, unmatched fiddling style, and a rich tradition of song and instrumental music. The islands are also home to French-Canadian trad-folk trio Vishtèn, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Emmanuelle and Pastelle LeBlanc from the Evangeline Region of Prince Edward Island, and Magdalen Islands native and fiddler Pascal Miousse - all raised in homes where traditional music, percussive dance and raucous kitchen parties were part of everyday life. 

One of the most respected bands on the international folk music scene today, Vishtèn has been cultivating its admixture of traditional French songs and original instrumentals for 15 years, fusing Celtic and Acadian genres with their own modern indie-folk-rock sound and touring extensively throughout North America, Europe, and Australia. Those dedicated years of combining arduous archival research into traditional French Acadian songs with their own creations culminates on the Vishtèn’s sixth album Horizons. It is a record that represents a coming-of-age of the band’s unique neo-trad sound and pays homage to the traditions and deep musical connections between their two island’s Acadian communities.

Written and arranged at Pastelle & Pascal's home-studio on Prince Edward Island and later recorded at Quebec’s Le Studio Chemin 4, Horizons represents both a departure and an evolution for the Vishtèn sound. “Horizons is quite different from our previous albums,” says accordion player Pastelle. Our style was much more traditional when we started playing. But it's evolved quite a bit since we started and now it's gotten more creative and we’re doing more of our own compositions, trying to push the boundaries further towards new sounds.”

A big part of developing that new sound was the decision to work with the album’s producer and engineer Simon Marion. A guitar, mandolin, and fiddle player himself, Marion has previously worked in both the trad and pop realms, often incorporating electric elements into traditional instrumentation. Vishtèn knew this kind of combination and collaboration was what they needed to take their newest material to the next level in production, and after a few weeks with Marion in the studio, the band had created what would become the Horizons sound.

“We knew it was going to be a great collaboration, reflects Pastelle. “We liked the fact that he really pushed us to bring in new things and he really supported our ideas as well. We all wanted to break free and go forward.”

A lot of new elements came into the picture as a result, like the utilization of electric guitar. While the fiddle is his main instrument, Pascal had played a lot of electric guitar before joining Vishtèn, so electric guitar has always been a close second for him. Yet, he'd never really explored that with a band, and the addition ended up creating a whole new soundscape for the album. Likewise, both Pastelle and Emmanuelle play piano, but the addition of electric piano was a very different approach, giving  Horizons more of a Rhodes electric edge.

The addition of dynamic new sonic elements is perhaps most evident on the album’s first track "Elle tempete". A common traditional piece in that there are many versions of it floating around, Vishtèn reconstructed and rearranged the piece,  composing a new melody to make their rendition more modern sounding and danceable. The band explored quite a bit on the song by adding unexpected flavors, such as a heavily distorted fiddle, and even ran Pastelle’s accordion through an Ibanez Tube Screamer distortion pedal, then blasted through a Fender Twin Reverb 1974 amp to achieve a unique effect.

“I was actually with the board and the technician in the booth,” recalls Pastelle. “They had set up an amp that was really pumped-up in another closed room and the result sounded really gritty. A lot of the layers on the album are kind of experiments like this. So it's quite electric, more electric than the other albums we did before.”

“L'autre femme,” was another traditional Acadian song that the band wanted to push further and give a more modern feel. They again added electric guitar and laid down multiple vocal layers to achieve the distinctive airy voice to the track, and even chose to play around with the bass side as well, using pedals to elicit a heavy Moog feel.

Vishtèn’s penchant for mastering the art of bringing tradition into modern form through original compositions is on display in the song "J'aime vraiment ton accent," which means "I really like your accent".  Says Pastelle, “We are French Acadian, so when we go to France, people are always like, 'oh, you talk like my grandmother used to talk.' Different territories have different ways of speaking and it's always a debate about who has the correct French. So we wrote this as a kind of a play on words, just to say we all have our background, we all have our French accent, and they're all cool ...I like your accent too!”

Here, Emmanuelle used an Acadian method for foot percussion, a wooden board with a contact mic attached. She put table-salt on it to create some interesting textures to accompany the tunes, all of which were composed by the band. The track’s initial faster reels drop off towards the end, and the track slips into more of an airy space with an incremental buildup of different rhythmic textures.

“The album is littered with really, really cool stuff that we hadn't really done before, and the creative  process in the studio brought us to that.”

While Horizons is just being introduced in the United States, it has been nominated for and won several awards since its previous release in Canada, including being nominated for the prestigious Juno Award. The band has received four East Coast Music Awards, including “Roots/Traditional Group Recording of the Year” for Terre Rouge (2016), four MusicPEI Awards and Québec’s Édith Butler Award in recognition of their contributions to la Francophonie Canadienne.