MACHINATION (vinyl)

Description

Listening to these eight songs that seem to sway gently, in turn struggling or playing with winds and swells, it's not entirely surprising to learn that 'Machination' was dreamed up on a boat. Over ten weeks in the spring and summer of 2019, Annie Lewandowski and her partner sailed alone in the Aegean Sea. Experienced sailors, nothing had prepared them for this extreme experience, oscillating between exhilaration and terror in the face of the wind, between wonder at natural beauty and despair at seeing plastic invade the beaches and the sea. There was no routine except this one: writing in the morning, when Annie was still imbued with extraordinarily vivid and almost palpable dreams, torn between lived reality and imagination. Upon disembarking in Lavrio (Greece), after these seventy days irradiated with wind and sun, she had the songs or their sketches.Sounding with a calm voice love and solitude, memory and oblivion, the strange and the familiar, Annie Lewandowski aims for the heart with disarming economy of words, a poetic writing that touches on the intimate (no longer being the object of desire of the person one loves, on 'Someone Else') as well as the political (the border, a place of fantasies and abominations, on 'Machination'). Directly from a feverish dream, one windless morning in stifling heat, 'Red Stain' projects her into a psychedelic reality where time is abolished and loved ones have become strangers.To this fraught, painful inspiration, Powerdove contrasts a nuanced treatment, between the softness of the singing and keyboard motifs and the myriad of percussive sounds imagined by Thomas Bonvalet, which both envelop and reveal the songs. Recorded at the Grange Cavale studio in Dordogne, 'Machination' obeys a logic unique to the duo, almost magical, where forms emerge spontaneously, from a setup determined by Thomas even before hearing Annie's songs. A light setup that unfolds into unprecedented sounds, obtained mainly from a small electric guitar whose strings are muted with paper tape, amplified exclusively with small pocket amps placed in the space and triggered by foot switches. These small speakers are associated with tambourines that vibrate with each sound. We also recognize the clicking of switches, a timer, a metronome, fragmented sounds that create depth effects.