Hélène Barbier seeds melodies that ferment in her head, pairing hummable lines with alien tunes conjured in someone else’s psyche across time and space. Siamese fragments. She creates imbalance through juxtaposition. Four simple notes become evocative alongside four disorienting, different notes, and this simplistic rule has become a basis for complex play.
Barbier enlists musicians based on willingness to break from tired chords, worn fills, and needless flourish—expertise aside. She switches between English and French atop aggressively anti-complicated avant-pop melodies. Off-kilter beauty ensues. Pretension and contrived professionalism are kept far away as these sketches find mature forms in an album that keeps the tedium of square music at bay.