Bordeaux · Health & wellbeing
In botany, anthesis is the moment a flower opens fully. It is a precise word for a living process: development reaching its fullest expression. Music Eye View set out to give that idea a musical form.
The brand
Anthèse, in its own time
On Rue du Colisée, in the heart of Bordeaux, Anthèse is the cosmetic surgery clinic opened by Drs Emma and Romain Lavocat. They conceived it as a home, almost a boutique hotel they themselves would want to stay in. It unfolds over three floors.
Materials, colour, light, furniture and scent give the welcome a distinctive presence. The counter and lounges extend the feeling of a lived-in interior. Clinical care remains at its heart; around it, Emma and Romain have shaped their own way of welcoming people.
Romain speaks of simplicity. Emma puts it this way: “never overdo it”. That sense of measure, shared by Emma & Romain, runs through Anthèse.
Its musical identity would need presence without insistence.
The project
A clinic, a boutique hotel
When we first speak in 2022, Anthèse is still taking shape.
Pascale and Éric are in Mauritius on a work trip when the first real conversation with Romain begins. Over an hour and a half, he describes the place he and Emma are creating, their tastes, their intentions, and the role they imagine for music — right through to the treatment rooms.
The conversation is lively, precise, immediate.
Emma soon joins the conversation. Anthèse comes into focus through two voices, while Pascale and Éric begin to imagine how it should sound.
The meeting also brings us back to a question we had been carrying for some time: what place might music have in a care environment?
In the hospitals, emergency departments and waiting rooms we had known, the soundscape often seemed to happen by default: imposed silence, a television left on, rolling news with its banners and alerts.
Anthèse gave us the chance to explore that question in practice.
The music would need to express Anthèse in full.
Sound identity
Notes and silences
As Emma and Romain spoke to us about Anthèse, the same impression kept returning: nothing about them tried to assert itself.
Their taste was exacting, never showy. The place they imagined had the same quiet elegance, the same way of allowing materials, colours and light to exist without underlining them.
That was when we began to hear Anthèse.
We wanted the music to hold the same sense of space, clarity and restraint — qualities that belong as much to Emma and Romain as to the place they created.
That led us towards melodies that settle without insisting, arrangements that let the material breathe, voices that find exactly the right place.
Voices became one of the most delicate threads in the search. We chose them for their clarity, the delicacy of their grain, sometimes for higher registers that lift the musical texture. Each has its own character; all share the same ability to settle into the space without filling it.
Little by little, the music began to resemble the place we were discovering with Emma and Romain.
Elegance without ostentation. Light within the timbre. Space around voices and instruments. “Elegance, light, space”: those words did not come before the music. They named what we were already hearing in Anthèse.
Let the music breathe, all the way into the silences.
Programming
The rhythm of Anthèse
Anthèse unfolds over three floors, in three moments. The music follows three rhythms, one flowing into the next, each tuned to a space.
The first begins in the lobby: at Anthèse, breathing begins to slow. An art book open nearby, coffee or tea within reach. Nothing is imposed; the place simply welcomes.
Then comes treatment. The music becomes more spacious: melodies grow more discreet, textures take up more space, and so do the silences.
Finally comes rest. The music turns ethereal, the pulse recedes, the layers stretch out. Anthèse’s third moment almost hangs outside time.
Lobby
Emiliana Torrini, Blue States and Devendra Banhart bring Anthèse’s most melodic side to the surface: supple lines, voices with the intimacy of conversation, a sound world open enough to let the light of the place move through it. The music leaves room for the time you choose to take.
Treatment rooms
The music draws inward. With Bruno Sanfilippo, Goldmund and Henrik Lindstrand, electronica favours textures, resonances and motifs that unfold slowly. Melody sometimes recedes behind the sonic material; attacks soften, silences appear. The music creates a more inward space.
Recovery room
Broken Peak, Hatsu and Matt Tondut reach towards a suspended, unreal, ethereal world, carried by ambient electronics in which layers stretch, resonances linger and the pulse grows distant. The music seems almost detached from time, creating a sense of retreat.
Three streams. One identity.
Governance
The score is still being written
Since 2022, we have kept listening to Anthèse with Emma and Romain.
We return, have lunch with Emma and Romain, sometimes share a drink. Between meetings, a message carries on a conversation or lets an idea take root.
We talk about music, of course, but in the end not that much.
We talk about plans, ideas, a new address they have discovered, an exhibition, a place, an instinct — whatever is shaping the way Emma and Romain see things. Then we return to the pieces that can quite happily lose themselves in the spaces of Anthèse.
Anthèse evolves; its melody with it.
We like the idea of change within continuity: preserving what makes the place singular while leaving it free to change. Anthèse’s musical prose can wander without ever losing its way, guided by the memory of past choices — a score written over time.
We return. We listen. We talk. We adjust.
“Our musical identity is part of how you experience the place. Music Eye View brought it to life with the discretion and attentiveness that characterise the way they work.”
Emma & Romain Lavocat · Doctors and owners of Clinique Anthèse, Bordeaux