{"product_id":"marion-rampal_oizel_2024","title":"Oizel","description":"After four albums and numerous collaborations, we will refrain from claiming that Marion Rampal is taking flight. Titled ‘Oizel’, her new collection, however, suggests a rise in altitude. Like the unfolding of wings akin to those of a seabird, it allows her to soar into the azure to better dive into herself, into those deep waters of identity, of foundational memory where the treasure of her childhood memories lies. If the figure of the bird has become essential, it is because it was already brooding under her pen. Her previous collection, ‘Tissé’, ended with a feminist blues, ‘Still a bird’, where an affinity was sketched that ‘Oizel’ extends and completes by invoking the spatial mobility of the migratory bird, the vital necessity of the nest, the healing song. ‘The bird, its symbolism linked to the idea of freedom, accompanied me throughout the gestation of this album, the challenge of which was to seize the French language more than I had done previously.’ While Marion has long reconciled the song format with the freedom of jazz, she has this time submitted to the strict adherence to a more classical verse-chorus structure that better fits the stories she wanted to tell, the emotions she wanted to share, the portraits she intended to paint. The one in ‘Tangobor’ evokes abandonment, distress, perhaps resignation, while, in contrast, ‘Grande Ourse’ makes us throb with a desperate desire to flee to a bluegrass rhythm with a klezmer twist. Partly inspired by a text by Florence Aubenas about a woman who broke away from the world to lead a wild life, the piece reveals that part of herself that she took a long time to fully embrace… ‘I have always been fascinated by these somewhat monstrous ancestral figures. This connected in a way to my desire to explore marginality and that shift towards the obscure, towards a madness that is also a liberation. The story of this woman in the Cévennes who lives hidden in the woods, enters unoccupied houses, steals food, clothes, turned my fantasy into reality. It allowed me to finish the song.’ It is indeed in the underbrush and abandoned houses of the French language that Marion weaves her way here to frolic like a child left to her own devices, inventing expressions - ‘Coulemonde’, ‘Gare-Où-Va’, ‘Tampi Mon Âme’ - almost a dialect in which she navigates between proper usage and poetic detours. The native Marseillaise that she is, although devoid of an accent, has retained a way of turning phrases that reflects local speech, that of grandmothers so present in spirit. French song carries such a heavy legacy for anyone who ventures into it that she had to respect its codes, its aesthetics, while infusing it with her own imagination through a language that is uniquely hers. ‘Words, words, it’s beautiful, words,’ she revels in a pure moment of mixed humility and wonder. Sometimes we get the impression of hearing ‘songs of yesteryear from today’ when ‘D’où l’on vient l’hiver’, ‘Gare-Où-Va’, ‘Beaux Dimanches’ in a cheeky duet with Bertrand Belin, or ‘Oizeau’, a muted ragtime, come along. As if to explore a new horizon in a familiar sky, she concluded with Matthis Pascaud, who produced the work, and Raphael Chassin on drums, a pact of lightness. They are the ones who imprint this watercolor sound that perfectly embraces this elfin voice for awakened lullabies and weightless ballads that brush against us, caress us, and carry us along the way. ‘Oizel’ leans towards fluidity, that of a folk drunk straight from the source, of a country escaping from a lavender field, of a sweet song gathered at the edge of a dream or a final and ‘perfect’ waltz, that of ‘Aux Fleurs’, emerging from a calanque’s backwash. Water and sky then merge into the same backdrop, that of a happy, bright, carefree childhood. We bathe in the memories of ‘Canards’, evoking in a pure moment of suspended happiness that way of diving at a right angle like a waterfowl, murmured in a duet with Laura Cahen, another siren. We sit in the kitchen of Madeleine, the grandmother of a thousand wisdoms, whose benevolent spirit resurfaces in ‘D’Où l’On Vient l’Hiver’, recalling the mythological function of certain birds to accompany the souls of the deceased. It is through the filter of this re-rooting, this deep re-enchantment, this re-reading of herself through memory and the senses that these 11 songs of pure emotion, of ethereal grace are distilled.","brand":"Marion Rampal","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58509065355608,"sku":null,"price":23688007.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0898\/4943\/0360\/files\/3521383477854.jpg?v=1789770838","url":"https:\/\/vinyles.com\/en-us\/products\/marion-rampal_oizel_2024","provider":"Vinyles.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}