Sophia Djebel Rose - A Light in the Forest

From Nico to Buffy Sainte-Marie, by way of Diamanda Galás. And then there's Heather Leigh Murray and Valet. If reference points are often beside the point, in the case of Sophia Djebel Rose's music they become necessary. Partly because the French multi-instrumentalist's style fuses rituals that are sometimes ancient, rock flashes and dark gusts, and partly because it's never easy to introduce the mysticism hidden behind her words. From the Auvergne region, of French-Moroccan origin, Sophia Djebel Rose seems destined for this. A free spirit since childhood, when she already said she wanted to become a writer to express the beauty of the earth. And indeed: the call of the forest, the pulse of the Alps and that of wild animals form the three-pronged attack of Sophia's compositions. Hers is a home lived within a permanent exile, which she herself describes as "specific to a childhood shared between two countries". Having finished her studies in literature and philosophy at 23, Sophia decided to drop everything for a nomadic life. And she embraced a green radicalism that would also become a hallmark of many of her lyrics. "Because poetry only makes sense if it's realized in action," she has said more than once.

It's a lifestyle that leads her through years of wandering across Europe, the Maghreb and the Middle East, where she performed with the experimental folk duo An Eagle in your Mind, a name echoing the track of the same name by Boards of Canada found on "Music Has The Right To Children", on which Sophia sings and plays the Indian harmonium. With no formal musical training, she simply follows her instinct from there: whether it's a guitar or a piano makes little difference. Sophia grows up artistically in the southern French underground, wrapped and protected by her unshakeable faith in the margins. A kind of religion that leads her, over time, to experiment relentlessly, more and more, until she embarks on a solo career, accompanied in the early stages only by a guitar. In 2020 she releases two compositions on the English label Reverb Worship, which specializes in ultra-limited editions and weird folk. It's the prelude to her debut album, Métempsycose, released in 2022. Sophia Djebel Rose writes her songs by staying isolated for days in the impenetrable forests of the French Massif Central. Forest and fauna. The uplands of Auvergne are in fact the natural space where the French musician stitches together her scores like garments for an unfathomable ceremony. Music for places outside of time, where the peak of Puy de Sancy is the ideal bridge from which to brush against the clouds and plunge into the transcendent.

Métempsycose holds nine songs with which Djebel Rose walks her demons along the trails and, like a grown-up Gretel, picks back up the pebbles scattered throughout her life so far. Ballads for wandering souls, then. Somewhere, precisely, between the Nico of "Desertshore" and Valet. Moments in which hope wears the guise of a ghost wandering through the woods. Wild souls are indeed paid tribute to again and again. As is everything that remains in the shadow of mountainous peripheries, in the chiaroscuro of forgotten existences. The title, "metempsychosis" in English, implies the transmigration of the soul as its guiding idea. Meanwhile the music resurrects the acid-folk of the Seventies, which Sophia drapes in a sibylline pathos. Proof of this is a lyricism that is at times desperate over humanity's tragedies, at others rapt in the grandeur of creation.

Sophia sings of drowned freedoms ("Libertè") and conjures Botticelli's Venus to turn her into an impertinent muse ("Venus"). When the accordion then comes into play, it opens the doors of an open-air cathedral ("Le Diable et L'Enfant"). Amid tears and prayers, one is finally left hypnotized by the deep light radiating from "Blanche Canine". The spare melodies, the shamanic timbre, the afflicted voice of a wounded matron, together express an impenetrable yet revealing feeling. Djebel Rose cites "Illuminations" by Buffy Sainte Marie as the guiding masterpiece behind her own songs. An important guiding record, to which is added the spontaneity of a writing style free of special effects.

A frenzied European tour follows, full of thrilling shows in the continent's darkest clubs, where the singer-songwriter stages her own liturgy alone, at the mercy of demons and butterflies.

After a sincere and much-needed break in the woods, in February 2025 Djebel Rose returns with her second album, Sécheresse, on which she again does everything herself, also drawing on the experience gained through her live shows: from indian harmonium to modular synths to guitars. If in the beginning there was metempsychosis — the transmigration of the soul as the driving force of a belief rooted in ancient India and the upaniṣads, esoteric functions intrinsically tied to karma — with Sécheresse Sophia turns to drought as a device for drinking from a lost chalice, through nine new movements in which spectres seem to descend from the clouds, summoned to exorcise, through a genuine and at times even "bleeding" vocal delivery, hysterias that more than once recall the gloomy atmospheres of past deities such as Patty Waters.

Between murky riffs and spectral drones, Sécheresse also draws its lifeblood from francophone folk tradition. Sophia Djebel Rose thrashes about and cradles herself amid the ever-present harmonium, modular synths and guitars, firing off one intoxicating proclamation after another, as happens in "Blanche biche", an eco-feminist anthem freely inspired by the medieval repertoire from across the Alps, already part of Veronique Chalot's repertoire. It's a song that tells the story of a woman who turns into a white doe at nightfall and ends up decapitated by her brother, who had gone off hunting, thus setting to music a fable of Celtic origin, famous in the days of Queen Marie de France in the 12th century, which the French composer adapts into the form of a highly possessed acoustic ballad, bristling with laments, anguish and invocations placed at the end to set fire to the undergrowth along the dark forest that inhabits her writing, and within which words thick with anger but also full of hope unwind.

The dark-folk mood that pervades the record especially animates "L'Homme au costume doré", the other surrealist tale with which Sophia Djebel Rose stages a genuine inverted rite of initiation, in which "what there is to learn is an unlearning", as she herself puts it. "L'Homme au costume doré" is the funeral of a man in a golden suit, staged in the midst of an unspecified series of nocturnal hallucinations and naked bodies glowing in the moonlight.

On Sécheresse, Sophia Djebel Rose sings throughout like a wounded muse desperately trying to lead us into a Platonic cave where less, indeed, becomes more. To give shape to her movements, Djebel Rose also tends to work by subtraction, embroidering her canvases without excessive ornament. Because Sécheresse is, in the end, an electro-folkloric mantra almost entirely free of modern trickery, sustained mostly by haunted vocals and a handful of guitar chords that growl in the shadows like rabid hounds. In this dance of mournful scores and arcane rituals, there's also no shortage of hypnotic episodes, electrified in their final moments with an unexpected "peace", as in the closing "Les noyés", which also brings to mind Anna von Hausswolff. It's the last ritual outside the hands of contemporary time, from a thrilling little opera staged by one of the most genuine musicians in today's electro-folk firmament.

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