MYRIAM GENDRON – ma délire (CD, LP Vinyl)

Vinyl (LPx2+MP3) wird derzeit nachgefertigt – lieferbar sobald wieder verfügbar! It has been a while since the release of Myriam’s acclaimed 2014 debut album, Not So Deep As a Well (Feeding Tube). The intervening years have brought a smattering of live performances, a bouquet of children, Trump’s Pandemic, and much more. For someone who likes to read and ponder as much as Ms. Gendron does, there has been plenty to mull over. Different concepts for a new album were broached, but the seed of Ma Délire was planted when Myriam recalled a paper she written in university. It was about Leonard Cohen’s recording of “The Lost Canadian (Un canadien errant)” from Recent Songs. Ostensibly a cover of an old Quebecois ballad, Cohen stripped away the specificity of the lyrics, tying the song’s titular figure to the archetype of The Wandering Jew (cursed to walk the earth after tormenting Jesus). The theme of this paper returned to Myriam when she had a residency at the Old Mill in Le Bic, QC in August 2016. Benoit Chaput had turned her on to the traditional tune “Au Coeur de ma Délire,” from a 1971 album by Dominique Tremblay and Philippe Gagnon. The song was so haunting, she decided to record it right there in the Mill’s boat repair workshop. That is the very recording used here, so you can hear the machines in the background as well as her young daughter, Cleo, adding a word or two. This started Myriam musing about how the end of the Catholic hegemony in Quebec had the unanticipated consequence of making people think less of traditional Quebecois folk music, because so much of it was soaked in the blood of the lamb. It made sense this music should be explored and updated despite its dogmatic origins. which Cohen had proved could be effectively expunged. Surely there was a way expand this idea in a multiplicity of directions. And so Ma delire began. *Les Albums Claus