We welcome two musicians, composers and performers, Kyrie Kristmanson for the album Floralia and Dom La Nena for Leon, instrumental album named after his cello. A bit of Canada and Brazil in Paris.
Our first guest is Kyrie Kristmanson for the album release Floralia.
Kyrie Kristmanson is a musical adventurer who likes to navigate between North American folk and the distant memory of the European Middle Ages. His first album, Origin of Stars, is inspired by the vibrations of the Canadian landscapes that saw him grow up. Rewarded at the Canadian Folk Music Awards, the album was released worldwide by NØ FØRMAT!/Universal France in 2010. She seized the spectators of the Printemps de Bourges and seduced Emily Loizeau who invited her to perform her opening acts. The tour that will follow will take her through Asia and Europe to the south of France where, intrigued by the history carried by the stones, she visits the ruins of medieval castles. These vestiges will encourage her to retrace the incomplete repertoire of the first female composers: the trobairitz. After completing a thesis on them at La Sorbonne, it is by taking the liberty of appropriating these love poems that she composed a second opus: modern ruin. Arranged for string quartet and voice by Clément Ducol, her tribute to these little-known female composers was released by Naïve in February 2015. Also fascinated by the discoveries of quantum physics, Kyrie then wondered about the hypothesis of a musical tradition come from a parallel world. The result of this questioning is the album Lady Lightly, a folk-cosmic that seems to have traveled light years across stellar skies. Recorded in an abandoned wing of the Palace of Versailles and directed by Saint Michel, the tour takes place alongside Etienne Klein, philosopher of science. Kyrie Kristmanson continues to explore and experiment with his guitar and his songs inhabited by very old and very powerful energies.
An eccentric personality with a singular universe, the Canadian adventurer Kyrie Kristmanson is a baroque folk-pop artist whose musical universe is part of the family of great unusual singers such as Kate Bush or more recently Jeanne Added, with whom she shared the stage.
After having crisscrossed the stages of France and beyond with her previous albums — from the Printemps de Bourges to the Primeurs de Massy, via the Folles Journées de Nantes — Kyrie Kristmanson reveals to us Floralia, a cycle of songs dedicated to Flora, goddess of nature and femininity. Through ethereal folk melodies as well as a sensual and mystical lyricism, the artist offers us a green spectacle lit by candlelight: a manifesto of unprecedented sensuality and poetry.
Floralia comes together like a baroque bouquet of flowers where country mixes freely with traditional Japanese music or even a kind of dylanesque folk in the era of the Rolling Thunder Review. For thirty-three minutes, the singer-songwriter-guitarist offers us a concise but abundant walk through her kaleidoscopic universe. Recorded at night between the nearly thousand-year-old walls of the Abbaye de Noirlac, Floralia makes us hear the haunting echo of the natural reverb of the stones and the breath of the bands which seem about to reveal the secret of their mystery to us. Indeed, the singer reveals to us: Je wanted Floralia to sound like an album discovered in the attic of an abandoned house, like the music of a bygone era or a forgotten civilization…”. Lullabies with the sweet scents of the past, yes, but those that dream of future utopias.
Titles performed at the big studio
– Hummingbird Heart Live RFI
– The gardenfrom the album Floralia
– Night’s Chorus, solo by Kyrie K. Live RFI.
Line-up: Kyrie Kristmanson, vocals, guitar; Anne Berry, vocals, viola; Mathilde Vrech, vocals, violin.
Sound: Mathias Taylor & Benoît Letirant.
► Album Floralia (Iki Records 2023)
concert April 14, 2023. St-Eustache Church, Paris.
Then we receive the cellist Dom la Nena, on the occasion of the release of Leon.
After the excellent Tempo in 2021 acclaimed by critics and which knew how to touch as much Iggy Pop that Britney spears, Dom La Nena is back with a new and fourth solo album titled Leon, after the sweet nickname of his cello. An instrumental, intimate, haunted and transcendental setting. A declaration of love to his lifelong accomplice, a return to the roots of great sensitivity.
Leon is a true masterpiece of chamber music composed in a quest for simplicity, emotion and beauty, responding only to intuition, improvisation and a single constraint: to compose only with and for the cello. A unique exercise for Dom La Nena who reconnects with his instrument, resuming the course of their inner dialogue. The composer is refocusing on her sound, her material, her textures, her nuances, her ability to create worlds and to inhabit them. Finally, the soloist is him.
Repetitive patterns, refined orchestrations, drones held like an om̐… Dom La Nena deploys a minimal approach very close to the mantra, whose active ingredient she knows by heart by repeating the same exercises every day when she works on her instrument. A state of forgetting oneself, of concentration, of appeasement, of the pure present moment. Leon brings to the ear his music, but also a collection of stories, a world in itself, populated by neat textures, spectral voices and contemplative silences.
From disk to disk, Dom La Nena received the highest praise from the international press such as The Wall Street Journal (“ A young Brian Wilson “), The New Yorker (“ Each of his songs is sacred “), BBC (“ Shiny and beautiful“), NPR (“ A music that is both soft and bewitching ») or The Guardian (“ An enchantment »).
She sang about time, her dreams and her fears, in the form of tender and poetic ritornellos, always supported by her cello. From the need to renew oneself, from the pleasure of returning to the source, from the desire to give thanks to one’s most faithful companion… Today, Leon.
A disc designed and recorded alone, in two months, at home, with a single microphone – before being mixed by Noah Georgesonknown for his collaborations with Rodrigo Amarante Or Will become Banhart.
Titles performed at the big studio
– Last Day, Live RFI
– Universe, from the album Leon see the clip with the Momentum Quartet
– Lake, Live RFI.
Line Up: Dom la Nena, cello.
Sound: Jérémie Besset.
► Scrapbook Leon (Sabia/Big Wax/Alter K 2023).
In concert in Paris on June 7, 2023 at the Théâtre de l’Athénée.