Marion Brunetto, ever devoted to DIY, emerged from her teenage bedroom bearing a string of tracks pieced together with an inexhaustible instinct for dreamy melodies.
Decollage was born out of the solitude of a teenage room. Marion Brunetto’s room. The musician, singer and tinkerer who leads Requin Chagrin hauled all her instruments and her old tape recorders south, to the south of France, where the sun spills across the façade of the family home in Ramatuelle. From this ephemeral studio emerges a fourth stellar record.
An intimate constellation that threads references to the longing for escape, from the single Parachute to Voyager, via Rêveries. A luminous mood. “Yet I wasn’t radiant at the start of the composition. Working alone sometimes overwhelms me with doubts. I wanted to return to the essentials,” she explains.
Memories of Surf Rock and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
True to her usual approach, the singer and drummer builds a basic rhythm and sets off in search of melodies on her guitar, bass, and synth. “I can redo the entire foundation of a track. For instance, the part started out guitar-forward, and I eventually rearranged everything to synth,” explains Marion Brunetto, who records on four-track cassettes, often found on Le Bon Coin. “Old equipment has that unique character with few tracks. It’s very intuitive for me. Their constraints offer me a certain freedom.”
In Paris, the sessions stretch over a year, within the walls of the prestigious Motorbass and Ferber studios, where she polishes the album with Antoine Poyeton without squandering her DIY spirit. Decollage draws its strength from this intense blend of home-crafted sounds made out of sight, the pure tones tied to the vast Ferber studio, and punchy live-ready guitars.
Requin Chagrin radiates a sharper energy, while retaining its longtime appetite—since its 2015 inception—for dream pop and 90s lo-fi. “It’s obvious, I was born in 1990 and my teenage bedroom brought forth memories of the rock bands of that era. I fed on Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Arcade Fire, and also the producer James Murphy.”
Not to mention the influence of West Coast surf rock that she continues to shape with her American counterpart, Sade Sanchez, the singer of L.A. Witch on Lucky Star. But the track that sends us into orbit is Cœurjoie, with its bass line and opening lines: “Somewhere in the night/We were dreamers/A little lost.”
Decollage (KMS Disques/Sony Music). Out on March 27. In concert at the Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, on May 6.
