SOPHIA DJEBEL ROSE - Sécheresse

Viens, viens, dans la nuit

Ton âme de géant,

Chante encore

Sécheresse

In the beginning was metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul as the driving force of a belief rooted in ancient India and the upaniṣad, esoteric teachings intrinsically tied to karma.

Thus death as a beginning, as the soul transmigrates from one body to another, until it is finally freed from matter.

French singer-songwriter Sophia Djebel Rose, among the most enterprising artists of the French underground straddling folk, experimental song and avant-garde poetry, returns two years after the much-admired "Métempsycose" with "Sécheresse", a work containing nine new movements that form a renewed liturgy, through which demons restlessly drift as if descending from the clouds, summoned to exorcise — through a raw, at times even "bleeding" vocal delivery — hysterias that more than once recall the bleak atmospheres of past divinities like Nico and Patty Waters.

Amid shadowy riffs and spectral drones, "Sécheresse" also draws sustenance from Francophone folk tradition. Sophia Djebel Rose does everything herself, playing Indian harmonium, modular synths and guitars, delivering one intoxicating proclamation after another, as in "Blanche biche", an eco-feminist anthem freely inspired by the medieval French repertoire, already part of Veronique Chalot's own repertoire. It's a song telling the story of a woman who turns into a white doe at nightfall and ends up beheaded by her brother, who has gone off hunting, thus setting to music a Celtic-rooted tale famous in the days of Marie de France in the 12th century, which the French composer adapts into a highly possessed acoustic ballad, bristling with laments, anguish and closing invocations that set fire to the brushwood along the dark forest inhabited by her writing, through which winds words dense with anger but also full of hope.

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.

In "Sécheresse", Sophia Djebel Rose sings throughout like a wounded muse desperately trying to lead us into a Platonic cave where less, indeed, becomes more.

Ce soir sur le parvis de l'église

On enterre l'homme au costume doré

Et dans la voiture noire

Disparaît à jamais la mémoire

De l'homme au costume doré

To give shape to her movements, Djebel Rose also tends to work by subtraction, weaving her tapestries without excessive ornamentation. Because "Sécheresse" is, in the end, an electro-folkloric mantra almost devoid 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 are also hypnotic episodes, electrified in their final moments with an unexpected "peace", such as the closing "Les noyés", a track halfway between Heather Leigh Murray, Valet, Anna von Hausswolff and Diamanda Galas. The final ritual, outside the clock hands of the present, in an exhilarating ceremony.

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01/02/2025