Philippe Lamiral Poirier & Roméo Poirier - Images Parlées (Self Release) [Spoken Word]
- The Slow Music Movement
- 2 minutes ago
- 2 min read
*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's May 22nd Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***
Ooof, this is a poignant one. Obviously, there have been quite a few familial collaborations in musical history, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head credited to a son and his recently deceased father. Startling premise aside, the music jumped out at me as a great listen even before I’d read the liner notes, but now it’s taken on a whole new dimension.
Roméo Poirier will be familiar to early subscribers and is a widely recognised and rightly lauded drummer turned leftfield downtempo producer, but I wasn’t aware he was following in his father, Philippe Lamiral Poirier’s creative footsteps; who was a multi-disciplinary artistic soul who flitted between painting, filmmaking, set design, guitar and sax playing.
The album is a spoken word affair consisting of presumably Poirier Snr’s voice reading from his own texts, and oh, don’t those vocals sound good. It’s a a cliché, but there’s a truth that the French accent is one of the world’s most sensual, especially when spoken and intimately recorded, although, whisper it, a soft Welsh accent tops it.
Unsurprisingly, Roméo pulls out all the stops with the production - think your favourite nineties trip-hop album, then double the listenability and production values. It’s a future past treasure, samples of old recordings - perhaps from his dad’s collection or family favourites, get chopped and precision placed amongst low-lit basement bar electronica - the sort of place with comfortable mix-and-match furniture, no windows, candles on the table, an orange light behind the bar and whiskies you’ve never heard of. Unhurried beats usher the voice through the speakers, and sometimes on a whim go missing.
Chanson gets a nod, and so does hip hop, jazz and the blues, whilst soundtrack moments from classic Parisian cinema flash into view, lighting the French proto-hipster heading to a gallery opening, as beatniks with more balls head to the absinthe bar. It’s as fine a farewell as a son could say to a father, and a celebration of a life that sounds like it was well-lived. A book of his paintings, Images traversées, will also be published simultaneously with the album.
"In this continual back and forth movement between text and image, music has always been present – sensitive and abstract, expressing nothing other than itself. It hollows out a place to tell us where we are. It is life without delay."
Playlist Companion
Find the Poiriers in the Slow Balearic Playlist.