Category: Music

Touching Base With France’s Former First Lady Carla Bruni

Carla Bruni
Carla Bruni “I don’t care – do you understand?”

Jeremy Allen interviews Carla Bruni in Paris about her new album French Touch, but politics is strictly interdict. “I wish good luck to Mr and Mrs Trump, I wish good luck to Mr and Mrs Macron, and I don’t care, do you understand?”

Listen: The Quietus | Features | A Quietus Interview | Touching Base With France’s Former First Lady: Carla Bruni Interviewed

Review: “Rest” by Charlotte Gainsbourg

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s first proper album since 2010, the upcoming Rest, doesn’t actually represent her first new music in that time—her 2011 set Stage Whisper included unreleased studio material from her sessions with Beck—but its first single builds enigmatically and beguilingly on the way her previous album, IRM, found romance in the void. “Rest” is also, fittingly, the first new Gainsbourg music since she starred in Lars Von Trier’s sensation-causing, sex-depicting 2013 film Nymphomaniac, for which she, with Beck again, breathily covered “Hey Joe.” There were hints of dance-tinged electro-pop on Stage Whisper numbers like “Terrible Angels” and “Paradisco,” so it makes sense that for this song she worked with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.

As with Beck, Gainsbourg and Homem-Christo turn out to be stunningly complementary matches. “Rest,” which the two co-wrote and co-produced, doesn’t bring the club thump of French house to Gainsbourg’s arty eclecticism, so much as turn a robot-disco banger inside out to suit Gainsbourg’s ghostly preoccupations. The title phrase, it has been noted, doesn’t only have to refer to a quick breather or nap—it’s also the first word in “Rest in Peace,” and in French it means “stay.” Gainsbourg’s fluttery whisper vacillates between French and English here, entreating unspecified souls to stay while drawing allusions to a song from the 1982 animated film The Snowman, according to a press release (“We’re walking in the air,” she whispers, quoting a song from the soundtrack). That’s set to a muted, laid-back electronic accompaniment that gorgeously befits a more typical idea of “rest,” with a muffled low-end pulse and lithe bass line set amid sparse, elegiac synth-plinks. Gainsbourg’s other Rest collaborators range from Paul McCartney to Owen Pallett, and she’ll be in theaters next month in a mystery horror film called, what else, The Snowman. Her “dead sexy” vision, as a colleague once put it, remains intoxicatingly her own. – Pitchfork

Source: “Rest” by Charlotte Gainsbourg Review | Pitchfork

‘It’s about the woman’: Meet rising French band, Her

The future stars talk about Her Tape No.1, their influences + being mistaken for an English band

“We are focussing on Her Tape No.1. It begins by talking about the dreaming, the lust for a woman, and that’s our track ‘Quite Like’. Then you have the love encounter with ‘Five Minutes’,” reveals Her’s Victor Solf, as co-founder and fellow band leader Simon Carpentier nods in agreement. “Then you have the experience of missing someone in ‘Her’, and finally you have the wedding in ‘Union’.”

This love story EP has won a lot of hearts in France since the Rennes-based band released it on vinyl through a French indie last month. However, their first ever digital release was ‘Quite Like’ in April. Although the full EP isn’t out digitally yet, Soundcloud streams have hit over a quarter of a million across their two releases, and plays have largely come from the UK and the US. [ . . . ]

Source: ‘It’s about the woman’: Meet rising French band, Her | Gigwise