Petit Biscuit — Presence (2017)
A spacious, atmospheric electronic album blending soft synths, textured beats, and luminous melodies, Petit Biscuit’s Presence offers calm, immersive soundscapes ideal for early mornings, late nights, and focused listening.
By Rafi Mercer
Some albums don’t arrive with force; they seep in. Presence is one of them — an electronic record that behaves like weather. Soft at the edges, luminous at its centre, built for those moments when the world thins out and you need music that feels like breath. I often return to it on mornings when thought comes slowly but clearly, when the room is still finding its shape. There’s something in its architecture — a kind of emotional aerodynamics — that gives you permission to drift and focus at the same time.
Mehdi Benjelloun, the French-Moroccan producer behind Petit Biscuit, was barely out of his teens when he made Presence. And yet the album carries the poise of someone who understands that electronic music isn’t just about rhythm — it’s about atmosphere. These tracks expand and contract like tides. They hold space. They let silence do some of the work.
“Creation Comes Alive,” the album’s early pulse, captures it instantly. Voices loop around each other like lanterns on water, illuminated but never fully graspable. The beats arrive clean, unhurried, almost polite. It’s electronic music without the neon — more shoreline than nightclub. You can listen to it at 7am or midnight and it will meet you exactly where you are.
But the heart of Presence lies in its emotional clarity. Tracks like “Waterfall” and “Problems” have that rare quality of being both light and immersive — the sonic equivalent of sunlight pouring into a cool room. Even the album’s peaks feel spacious. There’s no pressure, no urgency, no demand for you to match its pace. It has the confidence to move without insisting you follow.
And then there’s “Forever Being.” A track that hovers between nostalgia and dream-state, carrying that wistful shimmer that belongs to artists who understand how memory works in sound. Petit Biscuit layers synths like layers of thought — not to overwhelm, but to reveal that drifting, suspended feeling we all recognise but rarely articulate.
Listening to Presence is like stepping into a well-designed quiet. It’s music built for people who prefer intent over impact. For those who know that the real luxury is control — the ability to shape a moment simply by choosing the right frequency.
It’s also the kind of record that makes you think differently about design, space, and how a room receives sound. There’s a clarity to its production that makes any good system feel like it’s smiling. It’s the album I often reach for when I’m thinking about ideas — the luxury of listening, the architecture of speakers, the meaning of sound as status. Petit Biscuit makes music that understands interior lives. Presence is a reminder that calm can be expressive, and that softness is not the absence of power, but a different form of it.
In the end, Presence isn’t an album you play loudly. It’s an album you let settle. A piece of modern electronic minimalism that carries emotional truth with surprising maturity. A record for mornings when the day needs coaxing. A companion for the kind of thinking that tries to make sense of what luxury truly means.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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