SAINTE VICTOIRE "Red D1" [Single] (Antipodes)
Add Date: January 23, 2024
Release Date: Available Now
FCC: Clean
Formats: NACC Top 200, Submodern, Non-Commercial AAA, Electronic
RIYL: Phantogram, Fever Ray, FKA twigs
WHO’S SAINTE VICTOIRE ?
Sainte Victoire sounds and resounds like a religious allegory. No wonder.
This young Parisian artist, author, composer,performer and producer, received a JesuitC atholic education, which she hastens to sacrifice on the altar of her first artistic desires by composing stray songs. And it can’t be invented. At thirteen, his very first song was called «Jeune Pucelle».
Sainte Victoire has classical training – she did ten years of harpsichord at the Conservatoire,from six to sixteen years old – and loves sideroads. The handful of incandescent singles already released reveals the contours of a singular personality: in the confessions of a one-way love of «Only A Friend» and it's nebulous synths (2021), in its hymn to solitude chanted under the bells of the Angelus Introducing the tribal trance of «Hive Mind»(2021), in the vengeful spirit that reigned throughout «EMPTY» and its industrial beats(2022) as in the pop-electronic reverie of the tandem ride «All Night» (2023).
Her first EP «Cold Feet (How You Food-Poisoned Me)» builds bridges between techno indus, gabber, hyperpop, neo-folk, hip-hop,kitsch seventies sounds but also... baroque. A detonating mixture that finally resembles him.
EP « COLD FEET (HOW YOU FOOD-POISONED ME) »
With this first outing, Sainte Victoire hits hard! She wanted it in her image: authentic,extravagant, free and tormented... in other words, strange. The songs that compose today«Cold Feet (How You Food-Poisoned Me)» areco-produced with Paul Simm (Lana Del Rey,Amy Winehouse, Massive Attack...) and recorded in Paris and London: at Shelter,Spectral and Tileyard studios. Benoît Fleury(Kalika, Lord Esperanza) took charge of the mix and Chris Gehringer (Tinashe, Miley Cyrus) of the mastering. His music, conceived as an inner and mental journey, tailored for communion and letting go, has already travelled long distances and has not finished traveling.
Cold Feet (How You Food-Poisoned Me)», in the title a bit morbid and murderer who denounces the cowardice of all, opens on«Little Fruit», an improvisation that suggests the full extent of its vocal range. A daring bias,which comes from the exercise of style, where appears, subliminally, the flexibility of the movements of his first loves for the baroque. A marvel of rhythm and volume.
I tried to sing as loudly as possible but also as softly as possible, and it worked, “says the one who found in this experience, not one, but sung voices. In this song, theartist says she feels locked in by her emotions, which she shatters with her vocal cords.”
In this first EP, she condenses the small battles of everyday life as to exorcise her primal fears, paralyzing and deaf. A single red thread – the void – which even gives its title to one of the seven tracks on the record. «It’s something that scares me terribly and that I try to express as much as possible in my music so I never have to live it,» she says. In the title song, it is a toxic love that empties it... literally. When it is impetuous,dangerous, as in «What Power Are You?» , it burns, it consumes. And soon remains nothing but ashes, an absolute, irreversible void.
"Red D1", another song of revenge, seeks to ward off this emptiness in cruelty, to force oneself to feel something. «There are times when I imagine, as in Kill Bill, killing everyone, and expressing these impulses allows me to free myself, to end fear, because the worst is taboo, frustration», she justifies. Elsewhere, «Laughing In The Water», co-written with Cameron McVey,producer of Neneh Cherry, she watches the world fall(in the void, again) in a burst of laughter, both cynical and sadistic.
Born to a father professor in criminology,specialist in the Italian mafia, this great fan of genre cinema and sectarian excess fantasizes as a heroine out of the great coat ofCarrie (Brian de Palma) or Thelma (JoachimTrier). Women whose violence manifests itself when they begin to suffer their emotions,between family traumas and religious repression. “The feminine fury that ravaged everything is delightful,” she pleads. It is herinner fury that is expressed through her arrangements. «My first desire, she says, was to go towards the almost metal exuberance of rapper Ashnikko or the dance-punk duo Sleigh Bells».
First, there are her voices that she projects from the inside out, with sovereignty and authority but also with a sharp sensuality, and that she takes malicious pleasure in crushing with autotune, like a certain Bon Iver, whom she admires. “I find this land less invested by women, probably because we have internalized sexist dictates such as assigning well, having a nice voice...,” she explains.And then there is the surprise «What PowerAre You?», a reinterpretation of Purcell’s KingArthur. “I took the first four chords and made a melody over it with autotune,” she says. “Baroque, above all, has inspired me since childhood. And I don’t think anyone is more pop than Bach or Lully.” Urban and baroque... it’s the taste for risk that speaks!