After four albums and numerous collaborations, we won't go so far as to say that Marion Rampal is taking flight. Yet, her new collection, titled 'Oizel', suggests a new altitude. Like the unfolding of wings, similar to that of a seabird, it makes her soar into the azure to better plunge into herself, into those deep waters of identity, of fundamental memory where the treasure of her childhood memories lies. If the figure of the bird has become essential, it's because it was already incubating in her writing. Her previous collection, 'Tissé', ended with a feminist blues, 'Still a bird', which outlined an affinity that 'Oizel' extends and completes by invoking the spatial mobility of the migrant, the vital necessity of the nest, and the restorative song. 'The bird, its symbolism to which the idea of freedom is attached, accompanied me throughout the gestation of this album, the challenge of which was to embrace the French language more than I had done previously.' While Marion has long reconciled the song format with the freedom of jazz, this time she submitted herself to the strict adherence of a more classic verse-chorus structure, better suited to the stories she wanted to tell, the emotions she wanted to share, and the portraits she intended to paint. That of 'Tangobor' evokes abandonment, distress, perhaps resignation, while, conversely, 'Grande Ourse' makes the desperate desire to flee pulsate within us, to a bluegrass rhythm with a klezmer tendency. Inspired in part by a text by Florence Aubenas about a woman who broke with the world to lead a wild life, the song reveals a part of herself that she took a long time to fully embrace… 'I have always been fascinated by these somewhat monstrous ancestral figures. This somewhat matched my desire to explore marginality and this shift towards the dark, 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 undergrowth and abandoned houses of the French language that Marion sneaks in 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 meanders between good usage and a poetic, winding path. The native Marseillaise she is, though without an accent, has retained a way of phrasing that is typical of local speech, that of the grandmothers so present in spirit. French song places such a heavy legacy on anyone who ventures into it, that she had to respect its codes and aesthetics, but by infusing it with her imagination using a language all her own. 'Words, words, words are beautiful,' she revels in a pure moment of humility and dazzling wonder combined.
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