Manon David Club
Manon David Club
Rennes France
We are tempted to say that Manon David built her trio from the ashes of the Groupe Obscur – because if there is one thing that the Rennes-based team left behind, it is ashes. Ashes from hundreds of encircling candles, from incantations and spells, extinguished after eight years of service to pop straight out of a dream. She was the bass and the spectral voice, pulling the strings of stage ideas and costumes tinged with black magic. In the Groupe Obscur, where five fans of Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance and other Heavenly Voices moved masked in darkness, she sang strange stories in a language invented for the occasion: Obscurian. She wasn't quite Manon, nor was she a deified creature, but a fierce vein for levitating music to flow through. The Groupe Obscur represented the possibility of a world annexed to our own, a narrative enriched with each new album, with as many characters and poetry as the imagination allows. A sonic and visual adventure that left its mark on French pop with a raven black seal. Out of the whirlwind, and in the midst of the quarantine, she begins to scale the neck of her bass again. She is passionate about jazz rock (Marcus Miller in particular), replaying old Prefab Sprout records, Peter Gabriel, and live performances by Prince and the Revolution after years of bathing in the haze of cold wave. The first songs come out on their own without a precise idea of where they are headed, guided simply by instinct and a desire to express unadorned creativity. The lyrics are more personal, necessarily – on the cusp of the metaphorical trip and the head-on dive into buried feelings. Subtle, timeless writing, with poetic images steeped in the stories of Lavilliers, Sheller or Bashung. She quickly enlisted an entourage, imagining a trio so that the new pieces would come to life on stage. A drummer (Charly Saulay) and a keyboardist (Vincent Audusseau), with whom she composes and expands certain arrangements, glean new ideas. The project stands out from the previous one, in its themes and its aesthetics. Even though Manon still designs stage costumes for everyone, an obsession that hasn't left her – she leaves aside light garlands and cosmic symbols to adorn herself with bright colors and endlessly repeating patterns, into which she merges, and which accompany her in her metamorphoses.
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