Alexandra Stréliski arrived at INSCAPE from an unquiet silence.

She had released her debut, Pianoscope (2010), as an intimate statement on Bandcamp. It circulated quietly until film director Jean‑Marc Vallée placed a piece from that record in Dallas Buyers Club and later used her music in Demolition and HBO projects. Those placements moved her work from private rooms into public life and opened doors to collaborators and supervisors who would later request her music for television and film.

By 2017 the axis of her life had shifted.

Stréliski has said that the period leading to INSCAPE included depression, a separation, and a professional change. She left work in advertising and turned inward at the piano. The title INSCAPE names that inward travel. It signals both the contraction of the phrase "inner landscapes" and a nod to the literary concept of the self as a singular interior terrain. She set out to answer a simple question. What does a human life in transition sound like when played only on a piano?

The musical world she entered with INSCAPE had also been changing.

In the late 2010s a new audience discovered piano composers who blurred classical training with cinematic framing. Colleagues like Jean‑Michel Blais and Chilly Gonzales were reconfiguring public expectations of instrumental music. Stréliski did not copy them. She leaned into simplicity. She sought small, uncluttered gestures. Her aim was not surface prettiness. It was a vocabulary honest enough to hold anxiety and fragile enough to feel like a confession.

Her personal history threaded through the record.

Raised between Paris and Montreal and trained in conservatory settings, she had the technical grounding to write pieces that sound inevitable at the keyboard. But INSCAPE is not a conservatory exercise. It is a sequence of short, concentrated scenes. The album reflects a year when she had to unmake patterns and rebuild an identity. The result is music that looks inward and, by looking, produces outward clarity.

INSCAPE was recorded as a piano record and nothing more.

The album credits list Alexandra Stréliski as composer and pianist. Recording and mixing are credited to Pascal Shefteshy at Studio PM in Montreal. The record is plainly a solo piano album on the credits. These are not passing notations. They explain a production choice that governs every micro-decision on the record. The public intimacy comes from one instrument placed at the center and allowed to speak without orchestral disguise.

She produced the sessions alongside Maxime Navert.

Production credits name Alexandra Stréliski and Maxime Navert. Navert had previously co-produced her earlier work. His presence here is quietly consequential. He is credited with "musical design" on the track "Interlude." That credit suggests small arrangements or sound decisions applied to one piece while leaving the album overwhelmingly piano-focused.

The recordings favor immediacy over polish.

Bandcamp and label notes indicate the record was captured at Studio PM and mixed by Pascal Shefteshy. The mastering was done by Taylor Deupree at 12K Mastering. Deupree’s aesthetic in mastering leans toward preserving space and dynamic nuance. The sound here emphasizes the resonance of the instrument and the room. Where many contemporary piano records compress and flatten, INSCAPE preserves decay. The pedal, the key release, the sympathetic vibrations are part of the composition.

Technical collaborators are modest and specific.

Additional sound helpers on the credits include Maxime Vermette and Jon Kaspy. Those names imply small teams tending microphones, piano preparation, and mastering checks rather than large session crews. The visual presentation was handled by Catherine Pelletier for art direction and Élisabeth Gravel for illustrations. The package presents the music as interior work, not a product of heavy studio labor.

The recording choices are inseparable from the album’s emotional aim.

The decision to record primarily in one room with a single performer makes every silence meaningful. The piano is not rendered as a symbol. It is presented as a human voice. The studio becomes a listening room. That listening is the album’s first audience and, by design, the listener at home becomes the second.

Plus tôt

This opener is a compact waltz in structure and a declaration in intent. The tune arrives as if remembering an earlier self. The right hand gives a simple, circling melody while the left hand marks time with a hesitant, almost conversational bass. Recorded with an emphasis on key attack and decay, the piece announces the album’s landscape. It places the listener into motion without haste and establishes the aesthetic rule. Less is not absence. Less is attention.

The Quiet Voice

A miniature that trades grandeur for intimacy. The title names what the music does. The right hand articulates a fragile cantilena that floats above sparse accompaniment. The studio treatment keeps the sound close. Notes breathe. In the album’s sequencing it functions as a soft pivot. The listener has just been put in motion. Now Stréliski asks for silence to be part of the music’s fabric.

Par la fenêtre de Théo

The title means "Through Théo’s Window." The piece sketches a brief scene. The harmony hints at a minor key turning into something lighter by the end. Its architecture is cinematic in miniature. Given Stréliski’s later and earlier work for film and television, the track reads like a cue in which a camera drifts across a room and finds the smallest human detail. It sits in the record as one of its most picture-ready moments while remaining strictly piano-centered.

Ellipse

Two minutes of shaped repetition and elliptical phrasing. The piece loops motifs in a way that reshapes expectation. The left hand becomes a gentle, circular hinge and the right hand paints variations like light on glass. The track’s brevity is a strength. It refuses exposition and instead insists that the listener attend to the mechanics of memory. Placed early on the album, it tightens the record’s focus.

Changing Winds

One of the more rhythmically assertive pieces on the album. It allows dynamics to swell and recede more dramatically than earlier tracks. The theme moves through a sequence of gestures that feel like the body finding equilibrium. On streaming platforms this track became one of the more listened-to pieces. Its melodic clarity and anthemic smallness helped it function as a gateway into Stréliski’s world for new listeners.

Interlude

The one track on which the credits list a specific outside contribution. Maxime Navert is given "musical design" credit here. The piece unfolds with a small bed of processed resonance under the piano figures. That design is not orchestral. It is tonal shaping that extends the piano’s sustain and places subtle color beneath the keys. In the album’s sequence the Interlude feels like an internal moment of reflection. It is the record’s hinge between outward motion and inward reconsideration.

Blind Vision

The title is an oxymoron and the piece operates with that paradox. The melody moves with an inward insistence, repeating a figure that refuses to fully resolve. The left hand keeps a pedal-point that feels like a heartbeat. The recording preserves the key noises and sympathetic strings so that the listener can hear the mechanics of performance. The effect is a heightened realism that makes the music feel less written and more lived.

Burnout Fugue

A provocative title within a piano album. Stréliski employs the term "fugue" not to signal Baroque complexity but to suggest counterpoint in miniature and an obsessive return. The piece has a toccata-like energy and a forward push that loosens into space. The phrasing suggests exhaustion and the insistence of thought. Within the album it reads as one of the more dramatic points. It reminds the listener that the interior landscape she maps has rough ground.

Overturn

A longer track that creates motion through harmonic reversal. The music tilts and rights itself. The title names the sensation of life upended and then reoriented. The piano’s register is used widely here. Low bass notes ground the music while the upper register offers plaintive answers. The piece prepares the listener for the album’s movement toward something like resolution.

Revient le jour

The phrase means "Day returns." The melody is luminous without being naive. It is, in the logic of the record, an emergent light. The harmonies open and the tempo gives a gentle forward momentum. This track functions as the penultimate solace. It acknowledges the earlier darkness while insisting on the possibility of morning. Its placement before the final track makes it a kind of sunrise.

Le nouveau départ

Title translated as "The New Beginning." The last track is not triumphant. It is cautious and thoughtful. The final chord does not shout. It settles. The piece asks the listener to carry the record out of itself gently. After the inward work of the preceding tracks, this closing movement offers a disciplined optimism. It does not overwrite pain. It simply says that something else is possible.

The album as sequence follows the contour of an interior narrative. It opens with movement, moves through tentative voice and cinematic glimpses, and then deepens into study and friction. The Interlude is the central hinge, the place where musical design expands the piano’s color. After that the record presses into the darker textures suggested by titles like "Burnout Fugue" and "Blind Vision." The final two pieces do not resolve melodrama. They reframe it. The listener is led out of crisis into a patient newness. That arc is deliberate. The short track lengths make the record feel like a series of postcards rather than chapters, and that compression keeps attention sharp. The result is emotional density achieved through restraint and the quiet insistence of one instrument allowed to speak its whole truth.

INSCAPE arrived with an audience already waiting.

The album was released on October 5, 2018 on Secret City Records. Stréliski’s prior placements in film and television had already broadened her exposure. Within months the record climbed classical charts across multiple countries and drew critical attention from publications noting its quiet power and cinematic clarity.

The record received institutional recognition.

INSCAPE was longlisted for the 2019 Polaris Music Prize. In 2019 at Quebec’s ADISQ gala Alexandra Stréliski won multiple Félix awards including Author or Composer of the Year and Révélation de l’année. The record was nominated for three Juno awards in 2020 and won Instrumental Album of the Year at the 2020 Juno Awards. Those prizes changed how institutions in Canada accounted for contemporary instrumental music.

Commercially the album performed beyond niche expectations.

Label and press materials as well as multiple industry reports state that INSCAPE reached certification levels in Canada. The record was presented with a platinum plaque in the months following its Juno win. The music’s streaming presence grew substantially, with certain tracks reaching large streaming milestones and the album registering in the top strata of Apple Music’s classical charts at the end of 2018.

Its cultural impact extended beyond sales and trophies.

INSCAPE helped normalize a listener base for modern solo piano records that drew from both classical technique and cinematic phrasing. It opened doors for other pianist-composers to find an audience outside traditional conservatory venues and film scoring pipelines. The album’s success also reinforced the role of music supervision and television exposure in sending instrumental records to mass audiences.

Over time the album’s reputation settled into two facts.

First, that a single instrument recorded with attention to room and resonance can create a large public conversation. Second, that Stréliski’s work sits between film music and concert repertoire. INSCAPE did not invent that middle ground, but it made the terrain visible to a larger public and secured for Stréliski a place among contemporary pianists whose work is both private and widely heard.