Clara Ysé’s voice does not look her age. The artist will celebrate her 31st birthday in October but, listening to her sing, without looking at her, we would easily give ten more years to her tone. We share this thought with him. She doesn’t get offended. She responds, at first amused: “Everyone tells me that. This raises questions for me. » Then specifies: “Emotion is ageless. It is neither contemporary, nor past, nor futuristic. We often say of the voices that move us – for my part, I am thinking of Mercedes Sosa and Björk – that they cannot be classified into an era. »
Unclassifiable, Clara Ysé is also unclassifiable. Her singing voice reveals the lyrical accents that learning classical singing, which began at age 8, has forged. We note the elegance of the articulated words, without anything sounding anachronistic. The syllables are deposited on catchy melodies, sometimes epic, or hypnotic. The orchestrations call on strings and brass as much as synths and electro. Talking about “French song” seems limiting here: it is influenced by traditional music, starting with Greek rebetiko and the repertoire of the Mexican Chavela Vargas. “What touches me about this music,” says Clara Ysé, “is the very popular side: the ability of music to bring people together really takes on a particular strength. In this register, the texts are strong, simple, direct…”
“What we do with what is broken inside us”
Clara Ysé, who published in 2021, by Grasset, a novel, Firing, knows the power of words. When she was very young, she already imagined herself a singer when she grew up, but she also enjoyed writing poems very early on. “Music was my territory, my protected enclave, a place where I felt free,” says the woman who started playing the violin at 4 years old. For me, poetry was a way of bringing writing back to the musical domain. »
The title of his first album, Oceano Nox, which comes out this Friday, has been carefully chosen. “When you read them, it is not necessarily obvious that they are Latin, they give the sensation that they are futuristic. This sums up well what I tried to do in the arrangements and production of the record, using old elements and other more contemporary ones to draw a desirable future. It is a title which appears to us first in its musicality rather than in its meaning. »
Clara Ysé borrowed it from a phrase from theAeneid by Virgil, a text that she “adores”. The full quote is “Et ruit Oceano Nox”, which means “And the night rises from the ocean”. A formula that the author, composer and performer finds “to die for”. And relevant. “My album is about what we do with what is broken inside of us. We discover that, often, it is not repairable, but we can reinvent a world and make sense of what was broken. It is an album of transformation in the sense that it asks the question of how we encounter our “night ocean” and how we cross it. »
Drama
We must then address during our interview with the artist the delicate subject of the disappearance of his mother, the psychoanalyst and psychologist Anne Dufourmantelle. In July 2017, she died of cardiac arrest while trying to save a child from drowning. She was 53 years old. For those who know about it, this drama seems to haunt the record. The song Letter to M could be an attempt at cathartic exorcism: “Today I thought: But will this hoped-for time come when I will stop missing you, when I no longer want to hug you? »
“It was an event that triggered something in my life: I had to do something with that. But music has been part of me since I was 4 years old, so I would have made an album anyway, which certainly wouldn’t have been the same since an album comes from everything we’ve been through.” confides Clara Ysé.
All her texts start from the intimate, from her intimacy, but she willingly lets the public reappropriate them. “We compose songs when we can’t formulate something and we understand it years later. Through people’s feedback, we become aware of the different facets of a piece. Besides, the meaning of a song belongs to the listener more than to the artist,” she firmly believes.
So, The world has splitthe song which gave its title to his first self-produced EP released in 2018 – and which appears in a re-orchestrated version on Oceano Nox – was discovered by many two years later, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. “At the time of confinement, I received lots of feedback, as if it had been written to help get through this period. There was something that overwhelmed me,” the singer recalls.
“If you knew the hatred that flows through my veins, you would be afraid”
She also tells us about this message that a man sent her. He told her that that was it, he was sure he understood the words. It was obvious to him that the text evoked the tears which, by poking at the edges of the eyes, split our vision of the world. Clara Ysé likes this interpretation but she adds that her intention, with this song, was to speak of “the moments of astonishment that can happen during a tragedy, through melancholy or great joy. There is a wave of intensity experienced so high that the body dissociates. Often, these experiences are quite frightening and we have the impression of no longer understanding reality. »
We understand Gentle as an address to a companion or to men in general. However, by intoning “If you knew the hatred that flows in my veins, you would be afraid” she rather means to speak of “the injunction to gentleness which cuts us off from true gentleness, which coexists with anger and indignation” . We see in Sovereigns, in which she sings “You are sovereign, women who rub shoulders with hatred”, a feminist dimension. “It’s not initially intended to be feminist, it starts out as something intimate, but as society is what it is, it becomes feminist. »
A journalist who preceded us put forward the hypothesis of a celebration of “feminine power” through an album drawing on a mystical lexical field made up of “midnight sun” and “magician”. Clara Ysé does not believe in it, any more than in “male power”. She gives her definition: “For me, power is being able to connect to your desire, to hold onto your red thread. ” On Oceano Nox, she succeeds, balancing emotion. Strong. And ageless.