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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
This is an audiophile 180 gram pressing on midnight ultra-black vinyl from Optimal (Germany) that comes in a 24pt jacket with printed on textured uncoated 100% recycled Orford paperboard with a custom dust sleeve and 12" x 24" art poster.
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Eric Chenaux makes conceptual music that’s not meant to sound conceptual. He operates among various 'traditions' but perhaps most broadly, Chenaux's records grapple with the relationship between improvisation and structure in very particular, unique, idiosyncratic ways – and quite without irony or cynicism, through love.
Because fundamentally, Chenaux writes love songs, which he sings in a voice honeyed and clear, while his guitar gently bends, frazzes, chortles, diverges and decomposes. This juxtaposition of his mellow, dexterous crooning and his highly experimental (and equally dexterous) guitar explorations, explodes even unconventional notions of singing and accompaniment, of tonal and timbral interplay between guitar and voice.
As a solo artist, Chenaux's improvisation methods are in certain literal ways solipsistic: as a singer-songwriter, he plays his guitar around and against his voice, challenging easy notions of harmony/harmoniousness, improvising 'with himself' in pursuit of surprising himself (and his listeners) as he unfurls ribbons of voice and instrument often to the point of seeming independence, all the better to capture – and be captured by – unforeseen, intimate moments of interdependence: a definition of freedom, as a profoundly intentional state of openness, presence and play.
Even within avant-garde currents of folk and jazz balladry, Eric Chenaux feels like an outlier. Yet his music remains wonderfully warm, generous and fundamentally accessible in spite of its irrefutable iconoclasm. While the constitutive elements of Chenaux’s solo work in recent years might suggest some underlying devotion to asceticism, the opposite is much more true: his musical reveries resist, critique and counteract austerity (in all its forms) in a joyful abandonment to the improvised space where playfulness and light-heartedness are taken seriously, and where love is invoked and expressed, without reductive or facile sentimentalism, in a full, nuanced, clear-eyed suspension/rejection of the cynical life.
Slowly Paradise is Eric Chenaux’s new solo record – a lovely collection of mostly long songs guided by soothing, buttery singing and bent, fried fretwork. It is arguably Chenaux’s most assured and essential solo work, expanding upon the critical acclaim his previous releases Guitar & Voice and Skullsplitter have rightly garnered.
Thanks for listening.
credits
released March 9, 2018
Eric Chenaux: vocals, electric and un-amplified electric guitar, drum, various electronics
GUESTS
Ryan Driver: Wurlitzer 200A
Marla Hlady: spinning microphones
Lyrics written in collaboration with Ryan Driver
Produced by Eric Chenaux and Cyril Harrison. Recorded and mixed by Cyril Harrison at Le Pouget and Danube, France, 2017. Additional recording by Eric Chenaux at Avatar, Québec and by Sandro Perri at Sonology, Toronto. Mastered by Harris Newman.
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
supported by 19 fans who also own “Slowly Paradise”
Just a beautiful jazzy rap album with buttery smooth flows versed with huge talent. It's not only lovely to the ears, but the lyrics are profound and empowering about the struggles that she faces. zhangtastic
Canadian troubadour Konner Whitney expands his creative horizons with a vulnerable-yet-venomous record blending rock and folk. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 10, 2021
Moody and weird experimental pop from Melbourne follows the intuitive logic of the surrealist game from which the group takes their name. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 8, 2020
supported by 19 fans who also own “Slowly Paradise”
Angel,
I heard your interview with Jason Woodbury on Aquarium Drunkard's "Transmissions" podcast today. It was truly remarkable and touched my heart. I bought this album immediately afterward and am so grateful to you for this nourishing music in these strange, trying days. I hope I can time my next trip to Chicago to be able to see you perform live. Thank you! Michael Feltes