Maissiat and Hugues Pluviose

Butsiat

Album: Delta

We discovered her with Tropiques in 2013, then found her again with Grand amour in 2016. Maissiat returns seven years later. Seven years of uninterrupted writing and composition during which the performer has also explored side roads like so many tributaries of which his new album Delta is the culmination.

At the end of his Grand Amour tour: a trigger. At the invitation of the House of Poetry in Paris, Maissiat imagines a musical reading in which correspond his logbooks, his songs and his bedside texts. This scenic form gives another relief to her repertoire and reveals her as an extraordinary reader. This was followed in 2018 by a one-season carte blanche during which she created several new musical readings. For more than a year, Maissiat gave voice to major authors for her (Sophie Calle, Françoise Sagan, Goliarda Sapienza, Marguerite Duras and Alain Bashung), each writing a show in its own right.

A second path opens up in 2020: the one we had discovered as a singer and then a reader reveals herself as an actress in Dabadie or the things of our lives, a musical show created and performed alongside Clarika and Emmanuel Noblet. Driven by the words of others, however, the desire to write for oneself does not leave her. Maissiat records reality and the passing of time every day in his logbooks. She begins writing new songs, assumes to take the time and use it as a material that will shape each of them.

It is strong from all these crossings and this long-term writing that she returns today with Delta, a freed disc of which she signs the sound and the staging, like the two inseparable poles of the same world.

Hugues Pluviose

Album: walk for a long time

Hugues Pluviôse is undoubtedly one of the best kept secrets of the Nantes song scene. Author composer singer, his writing in chiaroscuro is tinged with a luminous melancholy. His music, crossed by different current currents, gives the piano a central place. “Marcher longue”, his fifth album, contains 11 titles including “The promise” in duet with Dominique A. With the theme of the journey, the escape, the migration; often mixing the intimate and the political; these songs compose end to end the story of a strange inner odyssey. In an intimate synthpop spirit, the piano meets here and there synthesizers, beats, minimal drums, vibraphone, bass, clarinet and French horn. ”Walking for a long time is what it took to be able to write these new songs; spending long hours in the forest; step by step into a sort of trance; leaving with a tune in mind and the will to find what exactly the haunting melody says, to find the words it naturally suggests. Walking for a long time so that the alchemy operates, that verb and melody merge somewhere within oneself, in one’s inner athanor, as if writing a song could be a way of psychic, spiritual transformation. Walk for a long time, in full introspection, in the nebula of dreams, of memory (“Vagabondes”, “Our living”, “Slap the wall”, “The crossing”, “Repair area”). Walk for a long time alone to get out a moment of the world, to better question it, to question “living together”, (“The promise”, “The use of speech”, “The future”). Walking a long time to face personal collapse, love breakup (“Walk for a long time” eponymous title).Walk for a long time, collectively, as migrants are forced to do, these peoples driven from their land (“Skin costumes”) or like those who, against winds and tides are constantly inventing “the next world”, setting an example (“La Grande Vigie”). So walking for a long time, to write this other album.

Hugues Pluviôse has also made four others [“Immobile hobo”(2013),“12 chansons-lucioles”(2008),“Les lois de la pesanteur”(2003),“Portrait ca-ché”(1999) ]. He participated in the recordings of Delphine Coutant’s first two discs and accompanied the singer at the Printemps de Bourges and on the tours that followed. He also composes and plays for the Live Show, in particular for the Alice Artistic Group, a Nantes street art company.