In our interview below, Orchestroll member Jesse Osborne-Lanthier describes their new album, Corrosiv, as a “kind of scorched new age,” which isn’t a bad way to put things. On the double LP, the Montreal duo of Osborne-Lanthier and Asaël Richard-Robitaille explore the dark currents that run beneath new age and wellness culture. The album functions both as a cultural critique and an earnest piece of damaged ambient music. It’s also a highly collaborative affair, which is why we chose to talk to not just Osborne-Lanthier and Richard-Robitaille but also the Italian producer Heith, who appears on standout cut “Velvet Myst.” Read the in-depth interview and listen to the record below.

Tell us about “Velvet Myst.”

Jesse: "Velvet Myst" started as a kind of crystallization point for some of the underlying themes on Corrosiv. Musically, it’s one of the more stripped-back and melodic tracks on the record, but that softness is deceptive. There’s something fragile and ghostlike in the arrangement, almost like it’s trying to soothe you while slipping something under your skin.

I wrote the lyrics with Dan (Heith), and we were thinking a lot about the enchantment that surrounds modern self-care rituals, wellness routines, and the whole aesthetics of healing. There's something seductive about it ... The language, the textures, the promise of transcendence through routine. But underneath that, there’s this quiet violence. The idea that you can cleanse, optimize, or soothe yourself into safety feels increasingly surreal when you’re still exposed to systemic rot, to exploitation, to social decay.

Heith: Yeah, while I was in Montreal last year, we talked a lot about all these contemporary “fake gurus” and online spiritual practices; the manipulation that comes out of it, but also the potential for real self-improvement through some simple practices. It's a very thin line between scam and real value. It's interesting to see how these spiritual practices change through the ages, and how they are reshaped by technology and capitalism. The same goes for self-care routines and self-care products. We were watching documentaries about cults at night and sharing our personal self-care routines in the morning. I felt it was a very meaningful time together.

Jesse: The song speaks to that contradiction. That even when you subscribe to the program, follow the regimen, maybe even pay for the guru’s guidance, you still end up cut open. You still bleed. And sometimes, that pursuit of health or purity becomes a kind of performance that drains you even faster. There’s this slow, poetic horror to it. Like trying to glow while everything wilts underneath. I’ve seen that distortion of care up close; my sister had a plastic surgery that her body rejected. It stays with me, that image of the body turning against the intervention meant to fix it. To me, “Velvet Myst” is about that space where beauty rituals and death drives start to blur, and where devotion becomes indistinguishable from delusion.

Asaël: Like a lot of the tracks on this album (“Blistex,” “Spume,” “Nerveghost,” “Rust Halo,” etc.), this one started as a dual synth jam. In this case, two plug-ins: me probably on Massive X and Jesse on Omnisphere. From the jump, we really liked the brighter quality of the texture and the vaporous feel to what we initially laid down. Sometimes our recorded improvisations can last for more than an hour; even two, and we have to cut through the material and splice/rearrange it a lot to get something coherent. In this case our recording was pretty much the length of what we ended up using as the finished piece. It had a start, middle part, and an ending. I guess we had a vision.

The rest went pretty naturally, we added more synths: some good old new age-y synth plucks and marimbas (Wavestation) punctuating the harmonic progression, noisier and complex details/ornaments, a sort of fusionesque pitch-bended solo and some vocal samples including an opera soprano singer, boys’ choir and pitched-up child-like voices. Also notable is the use of an arpeggio/pulse from the OP-1 which is pretty much the only gridded element in the whole piece. That’s what we liked about it, it felt poppier than usual, but nothing was locked to the grid, nothing synced to the arpeggio. The rest of the arrangement simply followed the movement and loose chord changes of the original jam. We were really happy with it for a while, but there was still a sense that something was missing.

We had talked for a long time about the idea of adding more real acoustic instruments to the Orchestroll mix, mostly guitar and percussion. Inspired by our recent venture with Marie Davidson, we were also trying to bring back certain rock elements. Back in the studio, we ended up with a hybrid of shoegaze and dry Americana desert guitar, kinda floating on top of a new age synthetic landscape. This version stayed pretty much as is for about a year. We both listened to it often, shared it with friends, and even performed it once or twice in Montreal. But we kept debating whether it was finished or if it still needed one more element—something even more melodic and upfront to really tie it all together.

We’ve been collaborating with Dan in various configurations for a while now. It sort of became a tradition to book a gig with him in Montreal, where he’d come over, spend a week or two with us, work on a continuous performance (Orchestroll x Heith), and also jam, record, and produce new material at our studio. The second time we did that was for an A/V show at the Society for Arts and Technology. That’s when the idea came up that Dan would show up halfway through our set, join us onstage, play Soma Pipe, sing, and then we’d stay on and continue playing with him for his own set, without an entrance.

We first played “Velvet Myst” live with Dan, and the performance came together naturally. He did some semi-improvised vocal melodies through his multi-effects unit, and it got Jesse and me very inspired. In the following days, we went to the studio and recorded Dan. After reworking the vocal line, the lyrics, making a few edits, and processing the vocals, we finally had a song—maybe the first real “song” we ever made as Orchestroll.

Heith: We literally wrote the lyrics and recorded the song all at the same time. After we played the show together, we were all inspired. Like, I was writing one sentence and recording it, then Jesse added another sentence, and so on. I still have vivid memories of that afternoon, where the light was filtering through the nice window on the main wall of the “Orch” studio. It was giving a very peaceful energy, and I think we really translated it into the song. Summer in Montreal is so nice, it’s so green and warm.

This project started via a residency at EMS Studios. Could you talk about that experience?

Jesse: The EMS residency in Stockholm was short but incredibly dense. We arrived right around midsummer, during the midnight sun, and the light never really let up. After a long-haul journey and very little sleep, we were dropped into this surreal state where time felt stretched thin. We were staying in this attic-like room with no real insulation from the light or the constant sound of birds, so sleep came in fragmented waves. Days bled into nights, and vice versa.

Most of our energy went into long sessions at the studio. We’d nap for a few hours, then disappear into one of the windowless rooms and stay there, layering sound, making decisions mostly by feel. When we’d finally step outside, convinced it had to be the middle of the night, we’d be hit with full daylight again. That kind of disorientation seeped into the process ... It shaped the pace, the textures, the sense of drift in what we were making.

We also got lucky with timing. The Halldorophone, this rare electroacoustic string instrument, happened to still be at EMS, just for one more day. It had been there for a year, and by complete chance we arrived the night before it was scheduled to leave. So we had this one intense day with it, and that session ended up feeding into the project in a subtle but important way. It was all very fluid; no strict plan, just immersion, exhaustion, intuition. The well is sorta running dry now but we recorded hours upon hours of sounds which have now found a home on Corrosiv or other future unfinished albums.

While we were there, we also finally met Nicolas Tirabasso, aka Visio, who was in residence at the same time. We’d been in touch online for years, exchanging ideas and mutual appreciation, but EMS was the first time we shared physical space. It felt strangely natural, like picking up an ongoing conversation in another dimension. His presence added a calm but generative energy to the experience—something steady in the middle of all that disorientation. We ended up recording material together that spiraled into its own direction, some of which is still evolving. That unexpected convergence definitely shaped how we experienced the residency and expanded the scope of what we thought we were there to do.

EMS is truly an amazing creative hub. The atmosphere there has a way of pulling things out of you, whether you arrive with a plan or not. I know Daniele (Heith) has spent a lot of time there over the years, and from what I understand, a lot of the recordings made during his residencies ended up woven through most of his releases. There’s something about that place, its isolation, its history, its density of tools and intentions that makes it feel like ideas can stretch further, or even change shape entirely.

Heith: I literally left Stockholm the day before they arrived! Ahahah. I was helping Visio produce his album and I spent one week there. It was fun to leave the studio, and the city, knowing that Jesse and Asael would arrive literally a few hours later and use the same studio and go drinking wine at the same spots.

Why did you choose for this album to be a double-LP? What is your history with that format as a listener?

Jesse: I’m simply in love with long-form albums, so it feels natural for me to make longer records. Especially with work that’s more ruminative or less immediate, I love the process of weaving a conceptual framework through pieces developed over many years. Sometimes a set of tracks or an idea just pulls you in deeper and makes you want to keep pushing, to see how far it can go. That’s exactly what happened with Corrosiv.

Asaël: I’ve always gravitated toward works that feel continuous, structured around leitmotifs, stretched across long durations, and thematically coherent in both narrative and aesthetic. I also love the physicality of a double LP, the fact that it offers four distinct sides, each of which can carry its own identity or mood. And as a longtime proghead, I’ve got a real soft spot for concept albums, rock operas, and other sprawling formats, which more often than not come as double LPs. So it felt inevitable that I’d make one too. Over the past two years, we accumulated a huge amount of material, and much of it felt like it belonged within the world of Corrosiv. As we kept developing the project, more pieces started falling into place, and it naturally grew into something that couldn’t be contained on a single record.

What is your relationship with new age music and culture?

Jesse: My relationship with new age music and culture is complicated, but creatively productive. I’ve always been drawn to the textures, the atmospheres, the sonic softness of new age. There’s a certain warmth and suspended promise in that world that’s genuinely seductive. It offers this illusion of safety and spiritual coherence that can be tempting, especially when everything else feels frayed. But at the same time, there’s something deeply troubling lurking beneath the surface. When you start pulling at the threads, it becomes hard to ignore the way new age culture often overlaps with reactionary politics, wellness grifts, spiritual bypassing, and commodified escapism. Think raw meat diets, cult yoga offshoots, urine therapy, biopower disguised as breathwork, tech moguls fasting into psychosis, suburban ayahuasca retreats, and all the other grotesque performances of enlightenment that capitalism stages for us.

So part of what interested me in working with those references on Corrosiv was the tension. Early on, the influence was mostly aesthetic, almost playful. It was a way to bastardize certain tropes without fully interrogating them. But the deeper we went, the more we felt the need to shift course. Conceptually, it became about corrosion. That was the turning point. The idea was no longer to indulge the imagery, but to rot it from the inside, to expose the cracks, the delusions, the violence that hides inside soft-focus healing narratives. I think what remains is a kind of scorched new age. Something that still flickers with trace elements of that world, but refuses its utopian closure. I’m more interested in what happens when the sheen peels off, when transcendence fails, when the myth has to face the consequences of its own denial.

Heith: When I was a kid, my mum was very Catholic, and I had a strong repulsion toward anything related to spirituality. As a teenager, I couldn’t stand new age music, I thought it was bullshit. I was into Cioran, Marx, Pasolini … Punk and industrial were my daily bread. But as I got older, I started to realize I was deeply drawn to music that carried a strong spiritual intention … Especially when I first discovered Coil around the age of 20.

Maybe there was some spiritual seed my mum planted in me as a child, and even my rejection of religion ended up pushing me deeper into spirituality. That was also when I started experimenting with psychedelic drugs, and somehow, new age music began to speak to my ears.

Asaël: When I was a child, my dad would put on records late at night, things like Paul Winter Consort, Pat Metheny, and Andreas Vollenweider. I always had trouble sleeping, and hearing those records would make me feel deeply uneasy. The cleanliness and airiness of the tones felt too adult, too pristine, and left me with a strange sense of sadness I couldn’t articulate. Later, in early adulthood, I found myself trying to recreate that feeling in my own work. It carried a kind of nostalgic weight, something ineffable I kept circling back to.

My relationship with new age music has always leaned more toward the instrumental than the meditative. For a while, I was mostly interested in music influenced by new age rather than the genre itself. Using digital new age tropes in my own music started as a kind of revolt. At the time, a lot of people in the experimental underground scene were fixated on dark, monochromatic noise or drone. For me, embracing synthetic softness was a way to push back against that narrow, almost religious tunnel vision.

What is an old-school new age track that never gets old to you?

Jesse: “Begin Where I End” by Steve Roach.

Asaël: “Sympathy and Acknowledgement” by Mark Isham.

Heith: “A White Rainbow” by Coil /  “Ask The Mountains” by Vangelis.

Is there a narrative to this record? 

Jesse: There’s a loose narrative, but it’s more atmospheric than linear. It isn’t a story with characters or a clear arc … it's more like a series of symbolic states, stages of dissolution, glimpses of entrapment and failed transcendence. The structure of Corrosiv reflects a kind of metaphysical erosion. It starts with a surface that feels familiar, maybe even soft, and gradually corrodes into something unstable, irradiated, uncontainable. Some pieces feel like they're speaking from within that breakdown, like dispatches from an afterlife that never resolved. Others feel like residue; traces left behind by systems or ideologies that promised healing, but collapsed under their own contradictions. If there’s a myth here, it isn’t a traditional one. It’s more like the story of its ashes. Not the myth itself, but what lingers after … Smoke, vapour, imprint, echo. Closer to a Shinto sense of presence, where nothingness holds everything and what’s gone still shapes what follows.

Are there any musical or sound-generating processes that you feel like are unique to your work on this album? Things that you were able to do in a collaborative mode that you wouldn’t do on your own?

Jesse: Well, of course, the whole idea behind Orchestroll and collaborating with people like Dan (Heith) comes from a kind of like-mindedness. Still, it’s never only about discovering a new sound. It’s about entering a different experience or ritual altogether, something shaped by the moment and the people involved. That’s at the heart of how Corrosiv came together.

One of the more unique aspects of the album lies in how we approached sound generation. There’s a strong focus on complex wave folding, creative filtering, envelope shaping, fractalizing echo, and reverb decay. These aren’t used as surface FX, rather as structural forces that shape the character of the music. Distortion plays the main role here. Though often treated as a tool to intensify, we used it more as a kind of debuffer or erroder. It subtracts, corrodes, and alters the integrity of the sound rather than amplifying it. That felt central to this record.

There’s also a chemical dimension to the sound design. Some textures seem to combust, curdle, or collapse under pressure. Many sounds feel alchemically fused, as though reacting to one another in real time rather than passively coexisting. That kind of volatile energy could never have come from isolation; it very much depended on tension, friction, and shared intuition that only collaboration allows. 

If you could sync this record up to any movie, what would it be?

Jesse: Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991) by David Blair

Heith: World on a Wire (1973) by Fassbinder

Asaël: 15 Incredible Chemical Reactions on YouTube.