Upon stumbling upon René Char’s line “I took my head as one takes a lump of salt and literally pulverised it.” Léonie Pernet was led to “Poème Pulvérisé”, a 1945 collection by the French poet and resistance fighter. Inspired by his text, she named her album “Poèmes Pulvérisés”. The full collection of her scattered poems is out now.
A crossroads of continents, the album links the limestone skies of her childhood in the Marne (France) to the deserts of Niger. From classical and electronic music to French pop, African and Arabic rhythms and experimental soundscapes, Léonie Pernet pulverises form, language, and composition.
Poèmes Pulvérisés opens with a foreshadowing instrumental piece, Brûler pour briller, in which synthetic voices and electronic textures engage in dialogue with a hypnotic orchestration Léonie has made her signature. What follows is a constellation of heady anthems — Acid Niger, Touareg, Paris-Brazzaville — percussive and electronic pieces driven by the desire for a world without borders. Léonie Pernet sings for the forgotten, the marginalised, the silenced.
Her third opus also holds some of her most personal and committed songs: timeless refrains already sounding like future classics. In Réparer le monde and Les Rênes, she tirelessly calls for peace. Je suis un souvenir, Le pas de l’au-delà, and L’horizon ose explore fragmented identities and memories, in an attempt to reassemble the scattered pieces and forge a new horizon.