ASCENSIONS (vinyl)

Description

After November 13, everything had to stop. Then everything had to start again. Quickly. Search for and find the pulse of Life. Write. Climb. Sing. To resist the cold. To resist, at bottom. This record is only a trace of life — among so many others — that returns to itself, stunned but stubborn. Inside are the voices, the sounds, the evocation of my friends, my loves, my heroes, of musicians, of people, alive or gone, but FREE. Ring. Ring. Ring. Play at music as one plays at Zorro. Defy God with cap guns. But not let oneself be pushed around. Not let “HIM” do it. Take up again where we began. To Life. Babx “One of the most gifted artists of his generation, and without doubt the only one capable of bringing so much breadth to French chanson. A natural son of LéoFerré, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Jim Morrison.” Télérama “Babx, to remember that beauty and rigor exist.” Le Point “Virtuoso singer, oversized writer with a maniacal goldsmith’s language, orgiastic composer, whimsical Babx, elegant, broken-down but always precise, endowed with an elephant’s memory and a visionary’s curiosity, BABX stunned us with his poetic and musical ambition, his power and his contagious fever. Convinced that we would not see him again for a long time, we awaited his return as one watches for a comet, the fall of a meteor. BABX sings, speaks, chants and his voice spreads out, laps, licks, coils, wrinkles, breaks, he even shouts, and the shiver takes hold. That says something. How long had it been since a singer who shouts moved us, pierced us? How long had that not provoked in us anything other than the urge to laugh? Since the previous BABX, in fact. His music is definitively organic, sometimes tense, sometimes languid, always sensual, abandoned yet held together, broken-down brass bands roam ruined cabarets in it, the musicians seem to have escaped from a drunken orchestra and survived the salons of the Titanic. Monk lurks in ambush, cubist and angular, Billie Holiday finishes Brigitte Fontaine’s drinks, we cross the night with Bashung: everywhere reigns the swaying, satin elegance, the classy drunkenness, everywhere we dance, on the brink of disaster we dance, since everything is ruined we dance, on the dragon’s back we dance, nothing more to do, while waiting for everything to collapse for good. Since the world is pitching, better to pitch with it, in Japan on the ice floe, in Islamabad or Little Odessa, on Lady L’s arm, keeping madness on a leash, very beautiful, very dignified, completely drunk, Baudelairean.” Olivier Adam