Leaving her audience still charmed, bewitched by An Eagle In Your Mind, whose album Intersection embodied dark folk ramifications, Sophia Djebel Rose hasn't abandoned her songs. Let's return, if we may, to the aural reading of this prodigious record.
Each work is an enigma, and that's where it all begins. Sécheresse takes part in the mystery of the world by exploring, like a satellite, the multi-dimensions of musical spheres, recombining the signals captured and the frequencies with which our ears are assailed.
After scouring the austere regions where only the wind favors you, Sophia Djebel Rose takes us on an odyssey for the time of a landing, where visions and illusions become matter, flesh, and intertwine to form incandescent tableaux. Through a single drop of darkness, when time burns the dials, appears in vision L'Homme au Costume Doré. In an imagery not unlike that of Claude Lombard or Catherine Ribeiro (notably Les Amandiers), Sophia tells us, with a refined elegance distilled from oriental folk, a few pearls hidden in a mellow assemblage of guitars, harmonium and bewitching drones. Pareille au Torrent, whose trembling arpeggios give off the scent of autumn, is the perfect blend of traditional and modern folk. This deep voice takes flight, before surveying the shores where the drowned are buried, we enter this sacred universe, where everything seems to disintegrate. The moods of Iress and the tones of Anna Von Hausswolff come to mind.
Such a momentary experience affects you so much that it's very difficult to live in this world without mentioning legends, and restoring them to our temporality. With a modest, georgic and luminous verve, she is this weaver of voices who re-enchants the world. Blanche Biche is a case in point: this medieval song conveys a message from ancient times to the present. And the harmonized vocal intensity reinforces this transformation, this creature surrounded by the dangers of this world.
Each acoustic instrument is captured from a particular angle, entrusted to Raoul Canivet (with whom she is currently sharing the stage on tour), and mixed in the same way as Métempsycose, the album that preceded this one, where the beauty is in the setting, where each composition is a poem. Sophia has turned a star into a rosary. She wears a dress, that of the night, not emaciated, but embodied by the elements that surround her. It is this luminous grain, illuminating the hollows of the paths, that leads us to places that only Sophia knows.
