Every month, Sophia Fanen (@SophianF) from the site Les jours chronicles 5 new features:
– Leyla McCalla, Dodininfrom the album Breaking The Thermometer (Anti, 2022) see the clip
– Kae Tempest, I Saw Lightfrom the album The Line Is a Curve (Republic Records, 2022) see the clip
– Combo Chimbita, Babalawofrom the album ERI (Anti, 2022) see the clip
– Vanessa Wagner, Study n°16from the album Study of the Invisible (InFined, 2022) see the clip
-Rema, Tiens moifrom the album Rave & Roses (Marvin Global, 2022) see the clip.
Then we receive Benoît Carré alias Skygge for the album release Melancholia.
It is under the pseudonym Skygge (the shadow in Danish), that Benoit Square leads a discographic adventure in the world of artificial intelligence. The musician and actor had set up the Lilicub trio in the 90s, which enjoyed a certain notoriety with the title Journey to Italie. Lyricist for other artists such as Françoise Hardy or Johnny Hallyday, Benoît became interested in composing with AI in 2016.
In 2018, he released the album Bonjour Monde with Stromae and the trumpeter Médéric Collignon, Kyrie Kristmanson, then the Ep American Folk Songs. Today is the album Melancholia which invites itself into the jaws of the AI.
He, who told flirtations on a Solex, spends his days in the back of a courtyard, surrounded by screens and software, playing with the ghosts of the machine, the vocal shadows, finding and twisting lost melodies that the software knead in his entrails, like scratching a moonstone, between the fear of what he is going to find and the exaltation. “It’s very long, winding“, says Benoit Carré. “Each song takes a month, I improvise, I grope. Sometimes I throw it away and then start again. I work with prototypes, I face bugs, technical incidents, failures, and the composition advances through accidents, mystery“. They are two or three to challenge and to transform this memory, to the point of making their own material far from the prohibited zone of plagiarism, the American Holly Herndon and the Yacht group. They are two or three to move towards a unknown land, full of doubts, leaving behind what they were in past lives.
The android Skygge has however kept something from the old days, something quite disturbing to which the robot can do nothing, which is called melancholy. It shines at the bottom of the dark cathedral filled with palpitating flesh that is his new project Melancholia, this beautiful name evoking for him a feeling and an imaginary city. Inspired by Andersen’s tale, these ten songs, deep as the black lake, were carved after a year of offshore sailing. A phantom atmosphere of the opera envelops “Melancholia”, the nasal singing of a sad clown touched by old age emerges from sad songa shattered cowboy serine with anguish his ballad of the shadow. On Ordinary World, an old keyboard tickles a synthesized voice. Skygge constantly changes the arrangements, in order to surprise. The strange galaxy he created evokes here and there the universe of Stephen King. This great novelist of shadows and crazy mechanics knew very well what made monsters frightening: less their appearance than the feelings with which they are endowed, like this wandering love (Wandering Love), who seems to be looking for a heart to take in a dark corridor. One of the prettiest complaints imagined by Skygge and a story as old as the world.
titles played, excerpt from the album Melancholia from Skygge
– Black Ocean see the clip
– Ordinary World
– Melancholia see the clip
– Shadow of a ballad see the clip.