Set up in 2000 by Aret Madilian (USA) and singer Beatrice Valantin (France) Deleyaman have released this year their ninth album. Their work is a deeply, artistic, creation mixing Etheral, Cinematic and Neo-Classic music influences together with poetry. The dreamy and sometimes mystic sound universe might remind the listener to Dead Can Dance. The band’s newest opus “The Sudbury Inn” is once again touched by grace and sensibility; an invitation to an imaginary voyage filled with prosperity. I talked about this new masterpiece with multi-instrumentalist Aret Madilian.

(Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)

Q: In a previous interview you said ‘music is a an honest friend you can be with when you are all alone’. I can imagine it was a precious friend considering “The Sudbury Inn” has been written and recorded during Covid-19. How did you experience this period and how important your ‘friend’ has been during this period and the writing of the new work?

Aret: Yes, the writing and recording of “The Sudbury Inn” began during the first confinement period. The creative process was pretty much the same as it always is with the exception that writing and recording the new material started much earlier than if we had gone on tour and performed on the road as we had initially planned following the release of our previous album “Sentinel”.

I am well aware that it was a very difficult time for many and in many aspects, especially for those living in cities. For us, living in the countryside and being in our studio, taking this time to create and record was a natural thing to do considering the circumstances.

Q: I guess music is not your single, honest, friend as poetry clearly is also important to you and again adapted in the new album. How do you feel when reading poetry and especially Henry Wadsworth’s “Tales Of A Wayside Inn” which has been a great source of inspiration to the new album?

Aret: I think that poetry and most literature are other forms of expressing your relationship to the world, to life, to existential questions, to nature, to beauty and everything else in between. And lately I have a tendency to think that what we may probably be losing along the way as a civilization is ‘the beauty and the poetry of our world’. It feels to me as tough the world around us and us as humans in general, we’re paying a very high price for what we call ‘technological progress’.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Tales Of A Wayside Inn” inspired some of the songs of the album because it depicts a world or a relation to the living that is now lost. I wanted to bring something of it back to life just for a while, for a time.

Q: Apart from poetry can you tell us a bit more about the ideas behind the new album and how did “The Sudbury Inn” see the light?

Aret: The music always comes first, meaning that I usually create a fairly advanced musical framework for each song within which we can experiment vocal melodies with Beatrice and eventually bring other instruments into the compositions once we find the path to the heart of each song. To be able to experiment with vocals, Beatrice and I either set out to write the lyrics to the music or we go through our old books of poetry or even philosophy, looking for some inspirational resonance, a spark in a phrase, a sentence or even a few words. I came across “Tales Of A Wayside Inn” one evening while reading a poetry book, searching with those musical intentions. The prelude of the Wayside Inn immediately designed an atmosphere in my mind, an enigmatic old world mood which provided key elements for the work and what was to follow.

Q: You again worked together with several guest musicians. How did you get in touch and what has been their true impact to the achievement of the album?

Aret: Yes, we worked with three new musicians Eric Plandé (tenor saxophone), Pierre Baillot (soprano saxophone, bansuri and oud) and Benoit Fournier (drums). As for Madalina Obreja (violin), Jules Maxwell (piano on the song “Another Evening”) and Artyom Minasyan (duduk), they are all musicians we have collaborated with on previous albums and during our live performances.

Eric who lives in Frankfurt, contacted me in 2021 because he had heard some of our music through a mutual friend and had seen our live show with Fanny Ardant. We decided to meet at our studio in Normandy for some recording sessions which went so well that we naturally took it further from there.

I had contacted Pierre initially for the album “The Abbey Project”, a side project, that I was asked to compose for a multicultural art festival for the Abbeys of Normandy. I was very pleased with the outcome so I asked Pierre to also be a part of our new album.

Benoit who is a friend, used to be a drummer in a Prog-Rock band. I asked him to come out to do some recording sessions for the album which turned out to be extremely creative, he was inspired. He is now in our live line-up.

Jules Maxwell who is a friend with whom we toured Ireland together, contributed the piano part to one song of the album.

Artyom Minasyan is an exceptional duduk player and is a part of our permanent line-up so he was naturally to participate to the recordings as well.

And for Madalina, I knew from the start that I would ask her to play all the violin parts for our new album as she had done for our previous album “Sentinel”.

The contributions of all these wonderful musicians to “The Sudbury Inn” are extremely important. The texture and the organic feel of the ensemble, just could not be the same without them.

Q: You mentioned the famous French actress Fanny Ardant and I noticed there’s a new live show planned in Autumn with her. I can imagine she’s a real particular woman to work with but what kind of person is she and how will the show looks like? Any further, ‘big’, plans?

Aret: Yes, Deleyaman & Fanny Ardant concert-reading will be on September 13th at La Maison de la Poésie in Paris. It will be our third show with her.

Fanny is great to work with because she is really passionate about her work. She is a determined and intuitive artist but works very hard on the subtleties and details of her performances. We will be doing a concert-reading which will consist of a combination of our songs from various albums as in a usual concert, including songs from “The Sudbury Inn” and there will be times within the concert when Fanny Ardant will be reading an essay from the Swedish author Stig Dagerman which we will accompany with a specific music composed especially for her voice and the text.

We are also invited to perform a concert-reading during a literary festival in France called “Terres De Paroles” on October 4th. We will be doing that concert-reading with Dutch actress Maruschka Detmers.

We then have a few dates in France including one on February 3, 2024 at La Batterie in Guyancourt. We are also looking to put together some concert dates for 2024 in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.

Q: I noticed you already did some live shows so how important is to you to get back on stage again and how do you transpose the songs from studio to live adaptations? Do you’ve any specific way to prepare a live happening?

Aret: In the very beginning, we used to be more of a studio band but with time, experience and lots and lots of work, we are at ease and very happy with our live performances today as well. Yes, we re-arrange certain songs differently for the stage, at times because it is necessary and sometimes because we prefer to. I like to think of live performances as another opportunity to be creative but I also really like to keep the live versions of our songs as close to the album versions as possible.

Inferno Sound Diaries

I have been working for over 30 years with Side-line as the main reviewer. My taste is eclectic, uncoventional and I prefer to look for the pearls, even if the bands are completely unknown, thus staying loyal to the Side-Line philosophy of nurturing new talents.

www.side-line.com

Jules Maxwell has a new single out via Archangelo Recordings, “A Rose On The Road (At The Traffic Lights)”, featuring Polly Scattergood. Next to the title track it also holds a remix from Glowlines.

“A Rose On The Road” first appeared as an instrumental on Jules Maxwell’s 2022 album “Cycles”. The title however had originated from a suggestion made by Polly Scattergood and, after the “Cycles” release, she and Jules continued to develop this vocal version.

Jules Maxwell is a multi-instrumentalist composer and songwriter. He plays keyboards for Australian band Dead Can Dance and in May 2021 released an album with Lisa Gerrard, entitled “Burn”. In 2021 he also released “Nocturnes” on Archangelo Recordings, a collection of instrumental pieces, much of it written in collaboration with the UK dance company Vincent Dance Theatre. This was followed in 2022 by a second volume of instrumentals entitled “Cycles”.

Polly Scattergood is a British-based indie electronic artist and was signed with Daniel Miller’s Mute label. She has released four studio albums, three under her own name and one as a side project called onDeadWaves with Mercury-nominated MAPS. She set up her own label and studio, Future Paradise, based on the Kent Coast and released her last album and EP through FP. Polly’s latest full-length album was “In This Moment”. She is currently in the process of writing her fifth studio album.

Here’s the video for the track.

And this is the single itself.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

(Photo by Robbie Perry) Out now is a brand new live video from Dead Can Dance front woman Lisa Gerrard and Jules Maxwell : “Noyalain (Burn)”. This is the first release by the duo from their new album “One Night in Porto”. “Noyalain (Burn)” was originally featured on their 2021 collaboration “Burn” released via Atlantic Curve in March 2021.

On the below video you will hear nd see Lisa Gerrard on vocals alongside Jules Maxwell’s piano and voice, with additional instrumentation by James Chapman and David Kuckhermann.

The single will be available on 24th April with the album released digitally on 12th May and physically on 30th June. Lisa Gerard and Jules Maxwell will play a special one-off concert to celebrate the album’s release, at the Wielki Theatre in Lodz, Poland on 1st July.

The recording was made last year, in November, when the duo was invited on a short tour of Portugal, performing the album live for the first time. On Wednesday 22nd November the third concert of that tour, at the Casa da Música in Porto, was recorded for this release.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

Dead Can Dance singer Lisa Gerrard and Irish composer Jules Maxwell are to release an extended deluxe
edition of their 2021 album, “Burn”. This new edition includes Jules’ original demos and coincides with the duo’s first live concerts of the album in Portugal this coming November.

The record’s beginnings go all the way back to 2012 when Jules Maxwell was brought in by Dead Can
Dance as a keyboard player on their “Anastasis World Tour”. He and the band’s singer Lisa Gerrard created a new piece called “Rising Of The Moon”, which was performed as the final encore of each show.

By the time the tour finished in Santiago, Chile in 2013 the two of them checked for further opportunities to collaborate with each other. That happened in 2015, when Maxwell was asked to submit songs for the Bulgarian choir Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares album “Boocheemish”. He approached Gerrard once again to co-write material for the new release. From those sessions four new songs emerged for that release. With James Chapman (aka MAPS) joining the duo as producer, some further ideas were developed. James explains: “With Lisa remaining in Australia, Jules adding keyboards and percussion from his studio in Northern France, and me bringing new light to the sound from England, the three of us were literally worlds apart but somehow these worlds became fused in the music.”

The “Burn” deluxe edition consists of the seven original tracks from the album, plus Jules Maxwell’s
original 2015 demos. Jules Maxwell reflects: “It took ‘Burn’ nearly six years to be finally released, and over time I pretty much forgot about my original demos from 2015. I just rejoiced in the fact that James had utterly transformed the songs with his sonic and arrangement choices. But when I heard the demos again I realized that what he has done brilliantly is take our ideas and remix them in glorious widescreen whilst maintaining the energy of the original ideas in the final versions. I think, as a collection, this new expanded edition gives listeners a fascinating insight into our creative process.”

Lisa Gerrard and Jules Maxwell will be performing “Burn” live in Portugal in November:

• 19th November 2022 ESPINHO, Auditório de Espinho
• 21st November 2022 LISBOA, CCB
• 23rd November 2022 PORTO, Casa da Música
• 25th November 2022 GUARDA, Teatro Municipal
• 27th November 2022 FIGUEIRA DA FOZ, CAE
• 29th November 2022 BRAGA, Theatro Circo
• 30th November 2022 PORTALEGRE, CAE

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci are to launch the video for “Until We Meet Again”, their new single which will be out on Friday but you can already view it on Side-Line. The track is taken from their upcoming album “Exaudia” and can be pre-saved right here.

The day that the first single “Until We Meet Again” will be released (on June 17) is also the day when the album also becomes available for pre-order. This recording is released just one year after that of Gerrard’s 2021 collaborative album “Burn” with Dead Can Dance bandmate Jules Maxwell, produced by James Chapman of MAPS.

For the new album the duo has been working alongside a team of other musicians including Bahar Shah, Astrid Williamson, Daniela Arbizzi, and Farhad Behroozi.

About Marcello De Francisci

Marcello De Francisci is a composer based in Los Angeles, having begun his career as a visual artist while attending fine arts at an institution founded by the famed Baroque painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo in Seville, Spain. He later furthered his education at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. In 2006, he won the Best Soundtrack of the Year G.A.N.G. Award for his work on Sony Computer Entertainment’s ‘God of War’ game. Soon after, he partnered with Lisa Gerrard and they co-wrote numerous motion picture soundtrack scores together, as well as collaborating on the solo album project titled ‘Departum’.

About ‘Until We Meet Again’, Marcello De Francisci says, “This piece is very much a story that depicts longing, distance between two people, it is an invitation to heal and a message of hope… We collaborated remotely on ‘Exaudia’ during the holidays between Melbourne and Los Angeles as I recall, importing Lisa Gerrard’s vocals onto my session, which her engineer Simon Bowley had sent over on the night of New Year 2021. Whatever plans I had to celebrate that evening were completely obliterated upon witnessing the emotional impact Lisa’s performance had on me. The overall track in general, as a result, was instantly addictive and therefore, I proceeded to work alone in the studio until dawn”.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

In 2021, Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard released the “Burn” album with fellow DCD bandmate Jules Maxwell. She now has collaborated with composer Marcello De Francisci for the “Exaudia” album and signed with Atlantic Curve, a division of Schubert Music Europe, who will release the album on August 26. Note that the managing director of the label’s UK division is Daryl Bamonte from The Cure fame.

The first single from this album, “Until We Meet Again”, will be released on June 17.

Lisa Gerrard notes, “I met Marcello while I was composing for a film called ‘Kings’; he had wonderful engineering skills and I liked him as a person. After a while we decided to try composing together and went on to compose some film scores. I love the fact that Atlantic Curve do vinyl and were also very interested in pursuing the artistic side of the accompanying videos.”

Marcello De Francisci: “It has been an absolute gift to work alongside Lisa once again on this work, which we wrote very much with the intention to inspire her fan base both on the listening and cinematic end.”

Daryl Bamonte (Atlantic Curve, Label Head / Schubert Music Publishing UK, Managing Director): “After the great success we enjoyed with the ‘Burn’ album, I was honoured when Lisa got in touch to propose releasing ‘Exaudia’ on Atlantic Curve. This album shows the immense range of both Lisa’s and Marcello’s talents.”

More news later on.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

(Photo by Tony Wadham) “Deeper Sleeper” is the new single from Jules Maxwell who is also the keyboard player in Dead Can Dance. The single is out today. The track is taken from his forthcoming album “Cycles”, which will be released on 25th March 2022. The vinyl version of the album will also include a bonus disk of Jules’s “Nocturnes” album which was released in March 2021.

The track comes accompanied soundtrack, which was shot in Maxwell’s garden and which features a snail, one couldn’t have chosen a better image to go along with the track which starts as a simple piano motif driven track but turns into a dark soundtrack at the end.

Maxwell: “Working with Dead Can Dance for the past decade has taught me a lot about composition. Brendan and Lisa’s music is dense and poetic, but actually at its core it is constructed from beautifully simple strands. Like life. In my opinion that is why people can identify with it. Simplicity for me as a composer is the Holy Grail. I have spent my whole career trying to simplify and distill ideas to their essence, and allow my music to breathe.”

Here’s the video.

About Jules Maxwell

Jules Maxwell is a multi-instrumentalist composer and songwriter. He plays keyboards for Australian band Dead Can Dance and in May 2021 released the “Burn” album with Lisa Gerrard. In 2021 he also released “Nocturnes” on Archangelo Recordings – a collection of instrumental pieces, much of it written in collaboration with the UK dance company Vincent Dance Theatre.

He also composed 4 songs for Le Mystére des Voix Bulgares 2018 album “Boocheemish” and the song “First of July” which appeared on Foy Vance’s debut album “Hope”. Jules has also collaborated with Duke Special on numerous recordings, shows and projects including the 2009 National Theatre production of Mother Courage directed by Deborah Warner.

So far he has released 5 albums of his own material over the years and in 2022 will be releasing a second volume of piano instrumentals entitled “Cycles” on the Ghost Palace label. Jules Maxwell will be opening for Dead Can Dance on their European shows in 2022.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

Genre/Influences: Ethereal, cinematographic, chanson.

Format: Digital, CD.

Background/Info: “Sentinel” is the eighth album from the French collective Deleyaman. Just as for the previous album (cf.  “The Lover The Stars & The Citadel”) they invited Brendan Perry (Dead Can Dance) to play on one of the songs. Other guests like Jules Maxwell and Mădălina Drouvin Obreja have been invited as well.

Content: “Sentinel” is a delicious sound universe mixing elements of ethereal-, world-, cinematic- and chanson music. It’s maybe one of the band’s most diversified works. It’s an album filled with poetry and played with the grace of authentic instruments like duduk, bouzouki ao. It injects this ethereal touch, which is reinforced by the female vocals. The album sounds like the offspring between European- and Eastern cultures leading the listener into reverie.

+ + + : I like the album’s authenticity, which is mainly created by the use of multiple acoustic- and authentic instruments. The presence (again) of Brendan Perry playing bouzouki on “The Valley” accentuates the beauty of the work. Deleyaman stands for delicate sound treatments and creates an intimate atmosphere. The songs feel like a delicate caress while the poetry (mainly taken from French poets) empowers the melancholia hanging over the music. The male- and female vocals create a truly symbiosis. This is without a shadow of a doubt the most poignant and successful opus by Deleyaman.

– – – :  I don’t have any minus points nor regret about this album. Some might say that they were more into ethereal music before, but they now have a more personal sound.

Conclusion: “Sentinel” is one of the first ‘great’ and accomplished works from 2020! This is a diversified piece of grace and artistic beauty for which, we can only, but be grateful.

Best songs: “The Valley”, “Keep Me Light”, “Exil”, “De Roses Vermeilles”, “1973”.

Rate: (9).

Artist & Label: www.deleyaman.com / www.facebook.com/deleyaman

About Deleyaman

Deleyaman was formed in Paris in 2000 by multi-instrumentalist Aret Madilian and singer Beatrice Valantin, together with Gerard Madilian. The project’s sound has often been compared to Dead Can Dance, whose Brendan Perry contributed to its seventh album, “The Lover, The Stars & The Citadel” (2017).

“Sentinel,” the band’s eighth album, again features Brendan Perry, alongside guests Jules Maxwell and Mădălina Drouvin Obreja.

Inferno Sound Diaries

I have been working for over 30 years with Side-line as the main reviewer. My taste is eclectic, uncoventional and I prefer to look for the pearls, even if the bands are completely unknown, thus staying loyal to the Side-Line philosophy of nurturing new talents.

www.side-line.com