With this seventh album that is at once nomadic, intimate, and rooted in reality, the Frenchman gives his songs, born between Tunisia and France, a texture and a density unseen before.
“We like to warm ourselves in uncensored songs that lift us up in the face of the abyss.” This observation, voiced by Florent Marchet in Sortir les violons, was undoubtedly that of Jean-Louis Murat, to whom he pays homage in a moving Orcival finale. If this seventh album, Mobil Home, is named after one of his tracks about female emancipation, it is nourished by several seasons spent between Tunisia and France, of a thought “away from the Western gaze which is more self-centered”.
“If we set aside the somewhat easy wordplay, ‘mobile man,’ the mobil home evokes the possibility, dear to the child I was, of rejecting a place too anchored,” he explains. “Unfortunately, pauperization has overtaken that optimistic side, and the Mobil Home has mostly become the symbol of downward mobility. It happens that my songs often recount the precarity of our society, which affects women particularly.”
Mixed Emotions and a Political Issue
Thus Florent Marchet sings the gears of masculinism (Romance) but also the friendship we miss (See the Night Come), the weight of family logistics and the faltering couple (You’ve Got Someone, in mirror with I’ve Got Someone), the odd state that is adolescence (My Teen), love in its most exalted form (the single As Long as You Breath)…
As a result, fourteen tracks bear witness to a spread of influences, from Childish Gambino to Little Simz and Son Lux, and to an “art of bricolage in a duo” with the Belgian sound engineer Xavier de Maere, the singer’s brother Pierre. Always starting from piano and voice, Florent Marchet’s compositions are reshaped and filtered as the emotions invoked evolve: “Having come from instinctive recording, the studio workflow of the new generations suits me particularly well, namely to imprint on the take a mixing direction, an aesthetic.”
Listening to the protest songs We Won’t Do Anything and One Day the West, we ask the fifty-something author if existentialism is as intimate as political. “So many things determine us, it’s frightening,” he replies. “There remains the freedom to act, to move, to be able to give a dissenting opinion, including in the face of what algorithms and data tend to assign to us. Protecting the intimate space, the inner world, defending individuality and difference remains, in my eyes, a political issue.”
Mobil Home (Nodiva/Wagram). Released since September 25. In concert at La Cigale, Paris, on December 16.
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