Songs Of a Sad and Beautiful World

Description

In the fall of 2021, a wild idea took root in Moïra Conrath's mind: to spend 3 months traveling in a van along the Balkan route and beyond, with photographer Loïc Jaspard. For the singer and musician, creation is nourished by encounters and the world around her, and this journey was a necessity, a calling. Her dream? To explore the Romanian mountains, follow the Black Sea, tread the Croatian steppes, marvel at Montenegro, swim in Greece... to revive her artist's soul by encountering the elsewhere. Their challenge: to return with a musical travel diary and a suitcase filled with photographs capturing the essence of these places. Their shared idea: to record ambient sounds (the wind, markets, local music...) in each country to weave them into the heart of the compositions. This journey was a pivotal moment for Moïra Conrath. Twenty years after her first solo album, she felt a visceral need to write again, to see who she had become. She wrote one page for each country visited: Northern Italy, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Sicily. Eight pages, eight future songs. Loïc Jaspard, with his precise and free eye, immortalized these moments, these landscapes, these scenes of life. Back in Paris, the adventure continued in the studio. For the past three years, she has been collaborating with the talented guitarist and composer Laurent Avenard Kohler to bring these pieces to life. The result is a pure and organic music (voice, guitar, percussion) where emotion takes precedence. The ambient sounds recorded on-site form a "sound carpet," a ghostly presence that gives each piece its unique color, its own soul. It is a deeply personal album, a quest for self away from Parisian landmarks. This album is also a love story between music and image, an artistic duo with photographer Loïc Jaspard.