With her first EP “Issemou”, Cindy Pooch (pronounced Cindy Posh] unveils a hybrid folk track, nourished by gospel and polyphonic songs. In an expressionist and minimalist aesthetic, the Franco-Cameroonian artist offers five tracks carried by her voice, which oscillates between emotional intensity and melodic lightness. Imbued with a rare poetry, the texts of Cindy Pooch address strong themes, carrying doubts and questionings as much as musical certainties.
The EP opens with the eponymous track, ‘Issemou’. “It is a questioning. A doubt. It is the need to free oneself from the fears which antagonize the shadows and the light. It is also an ardent desire to reaffirm a trust in an omnipresent duality.” At the center of the composition: the delicate and poignant voice of Cindy Pooch, accompanied by an aerial and melancholic production in which organic sounds (piano, acoustic guitar), treated voices, and discreet sound-designs are intermingled.
‘In Nomine Corpus’ opens with a real life impulse, “I want to say things with this body”. A lamento which says the urgency to get rid of the yokes, as an answer to a violent sensation of suffocation. At the same time minimalist and complex, the song takes the shape of an accapella with several recordings of Cindy’s voice harmonizing and answering each other, carried by a lyric and spectral singing which comes to tear off some shivers as the piece concludes.
‘O se yatè’, “What do you say?” in Banen language, is a questioning of the way we talkabout and look at love. An ode to the poetics of romanticism, carried by a minimalistarrangement of harmonic progressions and breaks, with Cindy’s voice always in the foreground.
07.04.23 – PARIS – Studio de l’Ermitage