The Offline - La Grande Évasion (2025 DeepMatter Records Vinyl LP)

The Offline - La Grande Évasion | Vinyl LP - 2025 DeepMatter Records (DM025)

The Offline is Felix Müller, a Hamburg-based multi-instrumentalist and producer whose reference points run from 1960s French film soundtracks through 70s American jazz-funk and the library music that hip-hop producers spent decades sampling. La Grande Évasion — The Great Escape — is his second full-length album for DeepMatter Records, and started as something else: initially a concept album about a spaceship in deep space. Müller scrapped that framing but kept the underlying idea of departure and discovery, rerouting it into something more grounded in place, memory and photography.

The album runs sixteen tracks across two sides. The opening suite covers arrival and movement through landscape — "La Belle en Lumière," "Dans les Grands Espaces," "De Paris à l'Amazonie." Side B shifts toward the oceanic: "Les Oiseaux de Mer," "La Vie à Bord," "Les Îles," the closing "Nikonos V," named for the Nikon underwater camera series used by divers and ocean photographers. "Le Trip" (B4) features Kimo Eiserbeck, who also plays all the horn parts across the album — flute, tenor, alto and baritone. Hans-Christian Stephan arranged the brass and plays trumpet and flugelhorn. Felix Behrendt plays Rhodes, piano and organ. Müller engineered and mixed at Le Grand Schrank; Kai Beisner mastered at Louis Limbo Lounge.