"Kalthoum" and "Red & Black Light": two albums, two tributes in homage to women.
"RED & BLACK LIGHT" is an ode to the woman of today and her founding and fundamental role in hoping for a better future. The women in my family have had, and still have today, an immeasurable influence on all my musical work. Not least because they inspire me considerably in the way they deal with their daily lives and those around them. Despite their labyrinthine, complex and often dramatic lives, they carry within them a strength and stability similar to a form of unshakeable trance. They give me the impression that they never lose sight of what is essential.
Centred on an aesthetic that's more contemporary, more electro (or even pop), this album is made up of my own compositions, plus one song from today's diva Beyonce. Although the writing in these pieces is particularly complex (with polyrhythms in 19, 17 or 27 for example), we arranged them (with the three musicians who play with us) in such a way that you never hear the weight of this writing. So that was how we avoided the traps of elitism and didactic writing, and made an album that's transparent and limpid, a record for people to dance to, or even sing, but which still has many, many unsuspected themes, harmonies and rhythms superimposed over each other, and whose secrets could be revealed only through a mathematical reading of the album.
Recorded in France in Ivry-sur-Seine with Eric Legnini (keyboards), François Delporte (guitar) and Stephane Galland (drums), this album is above all a desire to represent the importance and necessarily complex nature of things and persons that are essential.