Emily Loizeau’s previous album, Icare, was produced by John Parish at Rockfield Studios during lockdown. Released in 2021 the album then toured for nearly two years. The ‘Icare’ experience made it clear to both Parish and the Franco / British Emily Loizeau that they wanted to collaborate further. Loops and pedal effects on the piano, mixed with keys, guitars, hypnotic voices and drums, all contribute to an electro acoustic ambience that evolves this new collaboration even beyond the power of ‘Icare’. Yet in the corner, throughout, is always a melancholic and fragile ballad. In the darkness of a post-apocalyptic vision, Loizeau seeks light; managing to capture this world with both a poetic and a subversive eye. La Souterraine (‘The Underground Passage’) came together, with Parish’s help, during a strict recording schedule which consisted of precisely ten days, with Emily and her musicians arriving each morning at the spacious Rockfield studio in the South of Wales, orchestrated songs (some in English, some in French) in hand. The space was divided into several booths, allowing the group to hear one another play and record live simultaneously. Initially inspired by a commission she had to write a song for a piece of contemporary theatre, Loizeau found she actually enjoyed the unexpected result the limitations and outside influences of the commission brought to her songwriting. For ‘La Souterraine’, she decided to evoke voices other than her own in order to avoid, what she considers, the more egocentric side of songwriting.
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