Description
Paris-based drummer and composer Anne Paceo - winner of three Victoires de la Musique awards - is renowned for her ability to create original, trance-like music imbued with spirituality, she continues to reinvent herself and surprise us.
'Atlantis' takes its name from the legendary island swallowed by a cataclysm around 9600?BC, destroyed for its corruption and materialism - a reflection of today's environmental neglect. In summer 2022, inspired by her first diving experience in Portugal, Paceo encountered what Romain Rolland called the "oceanic perception": a state where body and mind dissolve into water, time slows, thought fades, and sensation dominates. This profound encounter with the ocean became the central metaphor and emotional core of the album.
The thirteen tracks, shaped under Paceo's direction, feature Christophe Panzani (tenor sax), Zacharie Ksyk (trumpet), Gauthier Toux (keyboards), and Oxy (synth). Recorded in Paris after months on tour, the album balances the vitality of jazz improvisation with painstaking attention to detail, reflecting her multiple Victoires du Jazz and status as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
Atlantis embraces pop ambition and hybrid textures, drawing on folk (Joni Mitchell, Patrick Watson), Björk, electro influences (Steve Reich, Oneohtrix Point Never), Bon Iver, James Blake, and literary sources (Mariette Navarro, Paul Gilroy). Visual references from Wong Kar-Wai and David Lynch inform its dreamlike and cyclical structures. Field recordings - whale songs, surf, and underwater sounds- enhance the immersive quality. Collaborators include Laura Cahen and Piers Faccini, alongside Gildaa, Cynthia Abraham, Sandra Nkaké, and Billie Bird. Paceo's own singing, particularly on Love Song, conveys intimacy and connection, asserting the voice as a vessel of emotional bonding.
The album offers a chimerical journey of renewal and contemplation, where the sea, time, and human experience intersect. Familiar yet exotically immersive, it provides a rare space for reflection amid the relentless pace of the modern world.
