Pre-order of Delights Of My Life. You get 1 track now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
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releases May 31, 2024
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
180gLP pressed at Optimal (DE) comes in 350gsm jacket + 300gsm inner + two 12”x12” 300gsm art cards, all printed in LE-UV inks on uncoated Arktika artboards, with DL card. Artwork by Mariette Cousty.
Includes digital pre-order of Delights Of My Life.
You get 1 track now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
shipping out on or around May 31, 2024
Purchasable with gift card
$27USDor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
CD comes in a 20pt uncoated paperboard mini-gatefold jacket with inner dust sleeve for the disc. Artwork by Mariette Cousty.
Includes digital pre-order of Delights Of My Life.
You get 1 track now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
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Following the release of Eric Chenaux’s last album Say Laura (2022), The Guardian wrote “the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist.” With Uncut describing his songcraft “as delicate and lovely as a rare orchid” and Record Collector praising the album’s “sublime alien balladry” such are the accolades that have accrued to Chenaux’s unique and consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now.
Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux’s solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux’s own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.
In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux’s previous album left off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplay of the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux’s spartan home studio in rural France, Driver’s harmonically warped organ and Melanson’s electroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previously Chenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate both pulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive and intricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (including orchestral timbres like timpani, kettle drums, and woodblock) that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic. Driver also ramps up his role in the song arrangements (prefigured in his support playing on Say Laura), teasing out chords and melodic filigree on Wurlitzer that percolate more prominently with Chenaux’s signature fried guitar solos and succulent singing. Both trio members add dulcet backing vocals, most notably on the 10-minute tour-de-force of fuzzed and ring-modulated swing “This Ain’t Life” that opens the record. All seven songs on the album groove and sway, simmer and sparkle, like nothing in the inestimable Chenaux discography to date.
Chenaux’s tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you’ve heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant/out-music lens. Delights Of My Life conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind.
credits
releases May 31, 2024
Eric Chenaux: voice, electric guitar
Ryan Driver: Wurlitzer, voice
Philippe Melanson: electronic percussion, voice
Recorded and mixed by Cyril Harrison at Le Pouget, Condat-sur-Ganaveix, Corrèze.
Produced by Eric Chenaux, Cyril Harrison, Murailles Music and Constellation.
Mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering, Montréal.
Artwork by Mariette Cousty.
All songs written by Eric Chenaux SOCAN/ASCAP with lyrics written in collaboration with Ryan Driver (except “Delights Of My Life” by Eric Chenaux).
Thanks to Marcelline Delbecq, Forian Fouché, Bernice, La Crue, Marco Stangherlin, Olivier Touche, Antoine Marchalot, Maud Herrara, Eric Cazdyn, Jérôme Castel, Scott Thomson, Karen Ng, Aimée Dawn Robinson, Alexandra Hoàng Gilbert, Alexandre Bourit, Ernest Bergez, Emily Windows, Eloïse Decazes, Carol Reef, Charlène Dinhut and Florian Caschera, La Calade and Martin Arnold.
A special thanks to Rémy Poncet for the Wurlitzer.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council For The Arts, the Government of Québec, the Government of Canada and Canada’s private radio broadcasters.
Nous reconnaissons l’appui financier du Conseil des arts du Canada, du gouvernement du Québec, du gouvernement du Canada et des radiodiffuseurs privés du Canada.
Eric Chenaux is a purveyor of jazz, folk, and pop-inflected avant-garde balladry juxtaposing a warm, clear singing voice and
fried, noised, semi-improvised guitar . "A musician like no other." (Tiny Mix Tapes) "A singer possessed of angelic sweetness accompanying himself with visceral guitar, Chenaux succeeds in generating an astonishing array of timbres." (The Wire, Cover Feature, 2017)...more
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