Exploring our planet at human height, Dominique A composes in his new album The real world a symphony of the earth. It can be listened to as in concert from its opening. “Last Call of the Forest” begins with faint sounds of instruments tuning, a few piano notes seeming to wait for the last musician to join the orchestra…
Then rises the inhabited voice of Dominique A. At first light, fragile, it will settle crescendo in this musical jewel of seven minutes. “We will leave the bed of the fairies in the most perfect of silences”, sings the artist in this piece of bravery, which evokes just as much Paradise Lost of Milton than the daydreams of Michel Legrand in Donkey Skin.
A record “made in good company”
Never had the singer’s voice seemed so free, sensitive and close, never had his music breathed so much. It’s because Dominique A, an often solitary perfectionist, has surrounded himself very well for this fourteenth album. He had conceived alone in the bedroom of his family home, in Nantes, his first record, La Fossette in 1992, and recorded at home in full confinement his thirteenth, strange life in 2020. Today it radiates the strength of a collective of orchestral magnitude.
The double bass player Sébastien Boisseau, coming from jazz, the producer Yann Arnaud (who signed the soundtrack of the film Annette by Leos Carax), a set of musicians on keyboards, drums and guitars, a rich string orchestra of 15 instrumentalists…, the presence of this virtuoso ensemble can be heard in the spatialization of the sound, the opening of the pieces, the silences and breaths of the ten songs of Real world. “I wanted to make a record in good company, designed collectively around my songs and using the studio as a place of creation”, explains Dominique A.
Twenty-five days at the La Frette studios (Val-d’Oise) in 2021 forged the artistic cohesion of a group that inspired the artist “With the others”, an empathetic improvised title.. “We will only go well with others / We will only go far with others”, proclaims the singer, conjuring up, through the hope of collective awareness, environmental anxiety. “It is no longer a secret that the iceberg is sweating. »
Nature pulsates, omnipresent, from one title to another. The artist inscribes it carnally in his high, poetic, committed verb, without being demonstrative. He confronts it with another reality, that of the screens, in a powerful piece, “News from the distant world”, punctuated by electrifying percussion.
“These people look happy, they always laugh / Their faces seem to be made only for the screen / They talk about things that we will never see here / They have mouths that speak faster than ‘it is not permitted’. The song takes off on the edge of vertigo, before suddenly plunging into a padded silence: the screen has been turned off.
tenderness finds a place
It is then, at this breaking point of the record, that familiar, friendly, earthly presences gently return, embodied in the score by ups and downs, hollows and heights. Rocks, “evaporite, obsidian”, “His Majesty of the Ice Cream”branches, “an earth floating in a halo”of the “feverish stars”an oak tree with wide branches, a marsh, a path, a cove, roses and 360° of sky.
As the real world regains its rights, tenderness finds a place. “And everyone like spinning tops”, with an enveloping melody like a waltz, builds an intimate story that ends in serenity with this refrain ” and someone was waiting for me ».
Dominique A finds her radiance in the very contact with perils. This world, a source of concern, is always inhabited by presences, he reminds us. He places our lives at the heart of his subject, with this mixture of intimacy and escape that characterizes each of his songs. And when he decides to take us back to “La Maison”, it’s by means of a small train which “stops everywhere”to the rhythm of music that marries its pendular movement.
His journey will end “By the sea in the rain”, a song of masterful simplicity and poetry, the high point of an album whose beauty amplifies each listen.
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Dominique A, musician, singer and poet
No and 1968, Dominique Ané is the author of 14 records, six essays and a collection of poems.
1992. La Fossette reveals it with “The courage of the birds”.
1999.Shakesalbum radical.
2001.Best wishesbright fifth disc.
2004. Everything will be as before fits in the spirit of Bashung.
2018. Albums Any latitude et The fragility.
2022.The Impossible Present, his first collection of poetry appeared on September 15 (L’Iconoclaste, “L’Iconopop”).
The real world released on September 16 (Cinq7/Wagram), followed by a tour starting on September 29, including the Olympia on January 26, 2023.