You & I
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Label
- No Format
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Vinyl
- Color
- Blanc
Description
Pause. Like in a movie, undoubtedly a musical, when suddenly movement, time, and the whirlwind of life stop, suspended in a rare and magical moment of epiphany. When we discovered ALA.NI's first songs last winter, that was the effect they had on us—suddenly it was spring. It first happened online, via a pair of vaporous and hypnotic black and white videos.
Then a few months later, on the aptly named You And I - Spring EP, which began to reveal a little more about this mysterious singer. ALA.NI is a Londoner. Her parents are from Grenada, a small Caribbean island (whose memory her father celebrates by playing bass in a reggae-calypso band). She is a child of the stage, moving forward by bouncing from project to project. When she was very young, at 3 years old, she took ballet lessons, and that was her first crush, in the form of a rainbow. "We always ended by singing Over The Rainbow. It was in a church, with a huge stained glass window and the colored light spreading through the room. That moment made an impression on me. That's also where I started singing."
The rest of her life, until adulthood, is a grand, loop-shaped trajectory, in ballet slippers. ALA.NI continued to dance, while singing more and more (with a predilection for the repertoire of American musicals). "Singing is technique and discipline, a commitment that takes years."
But ALA.NI is a serious young woman, in addition to being gifted. She went on to become a backing vocalist, notably alongside Mary J. Blige and Blur. Then she studied marketing, and also ventured into fashion, presenting her collection in Paris in 2011. "There is a dialogue, a continuity in everything I've done. I didn't want to focus on one project, until now."
This "now" is ALA.NI's creative sap demanding to be distilled. It's her personal history catching up with her in the great loop. Among ALA.NI's ancestors, there is a whimsical ghost: great-uncle Leslie Hutchinson, aka Hutch, an international music hall star in the 1930s. In October 2012, Leslie Hutchinson was celebrated with the unveiling of a commemorative plaque on his former home in London. ALA.NI was present at the ceremony, and it was a revelation: "I realized everything he had done in the 1930s.
I was there, in 2012, free to choose my path; I just had to take the plunge. I immersed myself in Hutch's story, to continue it." Two months later, ALA.NI was in Grenada at her grandparents' house, where she composed her first song in the middle of the night. It's "Cherry Blossom," bloomed on the Spring EP, and we love it more than a little, more than a lot, passionately, madly, sweetly madly.
Because there is a real enchantment in ALA.NI's songs (which she recorded in London). They are astonishing, short, almost bare songs, barely arranged and instrumentalized, whose grace hangs by a thread, and mainly on ALA.NI's vocal performance.
Songs that recall the lush musicals of Broadway, but performed like chamber folk, minimalist and zen. You must watch, and re-watch, with a tissue box, the track "Darkness At Noon" that she sang for a "Concert à emporter" (Take Away Show) by La Blogothèque, as well as the clips she directs herself for each track on the album.
After hearing her few recordings, we saw ALA.NI live, and thus discovered that she also had the gift of moving people to tears, with a voice of incredible restrained power.
