Benoît Pioulard - Stanza IV

Label: Disques d'Honore – BHP10LP
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, 180g, Splattered Vinyl, Digital Download
Country: US
Released: July 11, 2025
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, New Age, Experimental, Field Recordings

Nine years after the release of 'Stanza III', American musician Benoît Pioulard returns with 'Stanza IV' - the fourth and most expansive instalment in his long-evolving Stanza series. Pressed on splattered vinyl, it comprises four long-form ambient pieces that are deeply layered, hauntingly textured, and rich with emotion.

Benoît Pioulard is the musical alias of Thomas Meluch, a Michigan-born, now Brooklyn-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and photographer. His prolific catalogue spanning releases on Kranky, Beacon Sound, Morr Music, and A Strangely Isolated Place - blends lo-fi folk, ambient drone, field recordings, and textured tape processing to craft immersive, melancholic soundscapes. His work sits comfortably alongside artists like Bibio, The Sight Below, and Marsen Jules, yet remains distinctly his own.

As Meluch recounts, the Stanza series began in 2015 as a daily meditative ritual during a grey Seattle winter. Each morning, armed with a Telecaster and tape recorder, he would explore new tunings and create gauzy, lo-fi loops of equal length. These sonic sketches—introspective, raw, and unpolished—became a kind of audio journal, a quiet process of inner reflection.

Following the death of his father in 2023, Meluch wrote and recorded Stanza IV in August 2024 at La Berceuse in Brooklyn, New York. Employing a medley of instruments and techniques - including electric and bass guitars, voice, bells, kalimba, melodica, Moog synthesiser, chimes, cassette tape, and field recordings—the resulting compositions unfold slowly and deliberately, inviting the listener into a space of remembrance, grief, and quiet transformation. It is a work shaped by loss, but suffused with dreams.

Our pick from the album is the closing track, “Steeples Writhe.” Just over ten minutes in length, it unfurls with the ceremonial grace of a farewell. Built from degraded tape loops, decayed vocal fragments, and soft ambient hums, it avoids resolution—offering instead stillness, presence, and a sense of gentle release. It is, quite simply, a moment of peace.

1. Xaipe
2. Ersatz Immortality
3. Fog Dialect
4. Steeples Writhe
5. Xaipe (Markus Guentner version)
6. Steeples Writhe (James Devane version)
7. Fog Dialect (MJ Guider version)
8. Fog Dialect (arovane version)
9. Ersatz Immortality (Clarice Jensen version)
10. Ersatz Immortality (Viul version)