SPECIO is Sasha Andrès x Nicolas Laureau. They started a studio collaboration back in 2018.
The first album is ready to be released, May 2024.
Spectral Night Bird
Specio is an eponymous project from a studio duo well known in independent or underground circles, male/female (Nicolas/Sasha), with a rock or even noise past (Prohibition for Laureau/Héliogabale for Andrès), now turned towards another ( besides?) jazz which takes them here to a fruitful elsewhere, which they had already touched upon through their latest respective projects (Don Nino, NLF3 / A Shape).
Sasha Andrès who sings or speaks with her different voices on the sound worlds of Nicolas Laureau.
The rich album is a series of long, strange and dreamy experiences which form open tracks which have the intelligence to send listeners back to a fertile imagination relating to parallel or secret universes.
We distinguish two kinds of temporalities on the album: effective pieces and more stringy titles, both having in common a pronounced concrete dreaminess and the rare angle of surprise
Let’s proceed with the description title by title
- Ex-Agir pays tribute to Belgian poet /writer Henri Michaux by an androgynous, full voice, accompanied by guitar and electronic worlds. A fraternity with the perfect Gnostic intellect chanted by the beat poet William Burroughs.
- Flux is a scientific narrative with a more electroluminous musical sparkle. A sort of notice listing instructions for use for an Otherwise Mastered. Like this Sharpen your heart so that it can survive the storms, the pains.
- Light Codes is a cascade of relaxed crystalline sounds, a multilingual narration of a white voice which is reminiscent of Moor Mother on Jazz Code (The album where the poet invites her guest friends to invest with her the free field of vocal tracks, Anti May 2023).
- Va Jouer ! Bird calls for a high-pitched voice, with an imaginary address to shake the listener from their torpor, appeal to their inner child and go play.
- Birds Nest displays an opening resolutely The End of the Doors, in the resonant timbral, it is a track where Sasha’s voice is much more floating, and is therefore enigmatic in an oriental color composed of harmonium and shaken maracas.
- Ouvrir is the most “Persona†musical poetry of the album, a little irreverent suspended theater not to be put between the ears of certain young kids because of its linguistic provocation. Open¦ Let it flow¦ and don’t wait for anything.
- Vertical Janus, we hear two vocal harmonies split with cascades of strings which make me think of the strict upright piano, where we played our fingers between cousins in this immense house in Burgundy. There is a strange, suspended tone there.
- Teenage finally sounds like the awakening of this reverie but retains a shoegaze color, Cocteau Twins mixed with a soft sonic youth.
- The bonus track Râga is the slow climax of the sessions, a thirteen-minute progressive Velvetian odyssey which takes the time to unfold like a Lewis Carrollian crossing of the mirror and occupies almost half of a rather numb side which leaves me speechless.
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Sasha Andrès is also an actress renowned for her role in ‘Elle est des nôtres’ by Sigried Alnoy (2002) and she will be appearing with many actors and actresses in the play ‘Woke’ led by Virginie Despentes for the Theater of the North, which will be presented in March 2024.
Nicolas Laureau recently took a step aside with the collective project and the album ‘Scaring The Mice For Revenge’ presented at the Marbrerie de Montreuil and he seems to flourish in duo projects like ‘Covers in Inferno’ with Françoiz Breut presented at Le Consulat of Voltaire and at Petit Bain or the upcoming RAD with Brisa Roché.
Stan Degré, 2024
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Crédits :
Sasha Andrès : vocals, percussions, noises
Nicolas Laureau : guitars, keys, piano, drums
All lyrics by Sasha Andrès.
Guitars by Erik Minkkinen on Vertical Janus
Recorded and mixed by Nicolas Laureau, 2018-2023 at Salon de Musique(s), Pantin and Studio des Taisnières, France. Mastered by F/lor.
