Disenchanted poetry and post-punk melancholy: Frédéric Lo sets Michel Houellebecq’s words to music in a twilight, dusky frame.
First, the vulnerable opening of Bleu du ciel central, served with synth pads and piano, summoning Georges Bataille as Hugo’s poetry: “Toward the end of a night, at the perfect moment / Where, without a sound, the blue of the central sky widens / I will cross alone, as if unseen by all, the inexhaustible and gentle familiarity / Of the boreal auroras.”
“Some authors set up appointments for us,” Frédéric Lo, the man behind this musical showcase dedicated to Houellebecq’s verse, tells us; Houellebecq, the author of a single album with Bertrand Burgalat, Presence humaine, more than a quarter of a century ago. In 2019, while he was working on the tribute album to his friend Daniel Darc, Cœur sacré (2023), he thought of the father of The Elementary Particles (1998). “I had read somewhere that Michel Houellebecq liked Crèvecœur, created with Daniel in 2004, and more particularly our musical adaptation of Psalm XXIII: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’” A longtime reader of Houellebecq from the start, he invites him to make his version of the psalm: “The meeting is as simple as brotherly. I admire his cold sagacity, his calm provocation, his gaze gently blasé. He even writes in his book Quelques mois dans ma vie: ‘I felt an immediate sympathy for Frédéric.’”
Houellebecq, Poet
In 2022, Houellebecq stirs controversy. Thus, when Cœur sacré appears, it comes without the fruit of their collaboration… to their great disappointment. “I am far from sharing his opinions, but for me he is a tremendous writer and his poetry speaks to me,” Frédéric Lo confides. “So we decide to continue working together, and to make an album.”
The result is Remember the Man, crafted by the outstanding musician that is Lo, undeniably committed to causes, if not to win them, at least to complex ones. Obviously, nothing here is very cheerful: reflections on the dawn of artificial intelligence (The Dialogue of Machines), the societal fracture (“You need to be at least two for a civil war,” he says on Lost in Useless Dreams), the toxic heritage of ancestors and the coming collapse (The Lonely Lands, The Old Roman Road). In autumn 2024, when Frédéric Lo “reads and rereads” these poems, he judges them “magnificent, intense”: “I circle around them, without finding the right moment. In winter, in Étretat, where I composed The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime with Peter Doherty, I am alone and it rains. The melodic axis asserts itself. I imagine Michel’s voice. I add scraps of sound from a twentieth century that has disappeared. I create musical themes that blend classicism, postmodern after-punk, and repetitive music. And there we are.”
Melodic Elegance
With a timbre that is at once flat and fragile, Houellebecq’s voice, Frédéric Lo delivers a musical weave of undeniable melodic elegance. This is demonstrated, among other tracks, by Ils chevauchaient le vent, between spareness and lyricism, adorned with female choirs, which evokes Bashung’s posthumous En amont. While allowing himself forays into new wave (Lost in Useless Dreams), catchy folk (Awaiting the Invader), or synthpop, notably on the almost shamanic ending of The Final Archipelago: “Silence grows and fills the atmosphere / The azure holds still and everything falls into place.” As the title itself unintentionally foretells, Remember the Man reminds us of everything we loved about Michel Houellebecq, and confirms the wonderful surprises that Frédéric Lo can conjure for us against wind and tide.
Remember the Man (Water Music/Modulor). Release on March 6. In concert at La Scala, Paris, from April 8 to May 7.
