Noche primera

Description

Noche Primera sings of landscapes inhabited by symbolist glimmers, warm and dark incantations, static dramas over rhythmic ostinato. It bursts with minor epics, laughs at slight heresies, worries about the first night. Noche Primera brings forth electricity from acoustic instruments, the polyphony of unison, the light of half-light. Since the creation of JUNE ET JIM in Barcelona in 2006, Marion Cousin and Borja Flames have been tracing, with their two voices and their two languages - French and Spanish - a singular path, which has since 2011 been part of that of the artist collective Le Saule (Antoine Loyer, Léonore Boulanger, Jean-Daniel Botta, Aurélien Merle, Philippe Crab, Camille Couteau). Nourishing themselves outside the framework of new or traditional French song, they draw the genre toward its margins, where currents mingle until they can no longer be identified with certainty. With their longtime companions, Renaud Cousin, the brother, the one who, with his rhythms, keeps the ground beneath their feet, Igor Estrabol, the friend who, with his woody and metallic breaths, makes it slip away, they shift boundaries and inhabit them. It was precisely on a border, that of the Río Bravo which separates the two Americas, that they had stopped for the composition of their first album, Les Forts, nourished by North and South American folk, as well as the psychedelia of cities. Their second album, Noche Primera, draws its sources from sung repertoires from different eras and regions, medieval Iberian songs, traditional African songs, Bach cantatas and Purcell songs, Latin American folklore. With trance as the common denominator. It was recorded at the Clouds Hill Recordings studio in Hamburg, on magnetic tape and on an analog console, and in the old-fashioned way, the four musician-singers playing at the same time and in the same room. From this came the fourteen compositions and interludes that make up this free-form, acoustically sounding record. New songs, yet ones that seem to have been blown from an ancestral well, that do not accommodate themselves to genres or geographical and temporal boundaries.