Zaho De Sagazan – Tristesse

Album: La symphonie des éclairs

Label : Universal Music Division Virgin Music Distribution Deal
© 2023 Disparate

An intimate and powerful song closer to the microphone, misty melancholy arpeggios and an ardent desire for freedom: La symphonie des éclairs is only the first album by Zaho de Sagazan, but it already deploys a solid and coherent universe. In the opening track, La Fontaine de sang, the singer invites us into the cockpit of a spaceship that takes off in a dreamlike and baroque direction.

On music that claims both Berlin techno and French electronica, the album is a singular response to subjects that irrigate the spirit of the times, such as the phenomenon of influence in Les Dormantes, a sublime song shrouded in insidious seduction. As for the piece Tell me that you love me and its padded piano, it functions like the memory of a nursery rhyme, a childish refrain whose theme would be the feeling of love in all its obsessiveness.

It is also clear that for the 23-year-old singer, music is a way to exorcise her demons – in this case a hypersensitivity which she understood to be a strength more than a weakness. This is the subject of the song that gave the album its title. And in Tristesse, she expresses with disarming sincerity her daily life in the company of sadness, a feeling that she personifies in an astonishing way.

We will also remember the slow spectral Je rêve, as well as the pleas for freedom that are the two songs that end the album: My Body and Do not look at you. With these two songs, the singer from Saint-Nazaire dissociates herself from a narcissistic generation. “There is nothing more beautiful than someone who does not look at himself, who does not care what he looks like and who just lives. So says Zaho of Sagazan.

© Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz