Description
A true chanteuse halogène, Eloïse Decazes has been haunting the ruins of French chanson for a few years now, notably with the group Arlt. Elsewhere she can be heard miniaturizing Luciano Berio’s Folksongs in the company of Delphine Dora, or improvising hymns to the Titanic on cassette with Le Ton Mité. Her mysterious timbre is immediately recognizable, as warm as it is cold, her deceptively serene articulation, and her way of warping durations by singing the shadows of notes in lieu of the notes themselves.
Eric Chenaux – a virtuoso guitarist – is known for having decided one day to cease taking his chosen instrument seriously, preferring to treat it as a bastard utensil by making it sound at the same time like an organ, a viola da gamba, an electric fishing rod and a handgun fired underwater. The worst part is that the result is quite beautiful. Apart from this, he’s a mad theorist and an admirable singer. For evidence, see his albums released on the Constellation label, which – with their minimal syncretism, their groove and their speculation considered as eroticism – evoke a sort of Arthur Russell cross stitched with Marvin Gaye. He is also an improvisor of the first order, destroyer of all clichés associated with the genre by dint of humor and paradox.
The shared enthusiasm of these two great anomalies for the chanson ancienne brought them together on the same album, recorded over the course of two afternoons in Toronto and issued by the Belgian label Okraïna (2012). One predominantly hears long laments gleaned from the Middle Ages through to the 19th century, rife with murders and metamorphoses, strung out with a pale voice and bristling with guitar counterpoint and dodgy melodica, drones and dissonances slaughtered with a bow. One seeks to reassure oneself by way of comparison to Nico and John Cale, or to Areski-Fontaine, but in truth this curious object does not resemble anything known. Their inaugural meeting of the unheard-of and the familiar, the antique and the ultra-modern, the learned and the not-learned-at-all impacted quite a few heads and the album quickly sold out, becoming the object of a little fervent cult among the lovers of not patently standardized beauties.
La bride (The Bridle), which is here released by the Lausanne-based three:four label (Norberto Lobo, Danny Oxenberg &
