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Written in fRoots issue 287, 2007
 

MARILIS ORIONAA
Damn
Armugalh / Darenlà 176403

A new Marilis Orionaa album is an occasion, and it’s never going to be an easy thing to review or describe, nor fit neatly with other CDs in a group review.
      A striking, slim figure with a pre-Raphaelite mane of chestnut hair, she’s a creature of her beloved Béarn. The songs she makes draw melodically on folk traditions and are largely in the Béarnais dialect of the Occitan language, but she’s not a traditional singer as such, though she’s definitely a significant character in today’s Béarnais culture. In some ways I suppose, though their musics and cultures differ widely, in her individuality, strength of personality and inseparable bond with her culture she’s a kind of Béarnais Mari Boine.
      She’s an exciting, dramatic singer, oscillating from the free, edgy, ululating reverberating wildness of a Pyrenean mountain voice to a soft intimacy when she speaks her poetry against the musical accompaniment of her long-time band: Arabic/flamenco oriented guitarist Olivier Kléber-Lavigne and percussionist Nicolas Martin-Sagarra. Producer-engineer Gérard Cauquil has also been with her throughout, and again, out of the minimalist line-up of voice, acoustic guitar and percussion, with creative studio work he has created a rich and complete sound.
      The songs on Damn (not a swear-word; derived from the Latin damnum, in Gascon it means wrong, punishment, damnation) include a fast, farandole-style dance song directed to Saint Jean, one about the town and people of Pau, one viewing traditional singer Rosina de Pèira, well-known since the 1970s, as an Occitan Oum Kalsoum. There are several musically accompanied spoken poems, including one in Greek remembering the village of Aspra Spitia, and wild mountain-calls enclosing a memoriam in French to a loved one still alive in spirit among the hills.
      The penultimate track is a simple live recording of her explaining to a well-amused audience why she doesn’t let her family come to her gigs. It’s in Béarnais, but such is the musical rhythm of her speaking it isn’t a dead patch for a non-understander, and throughout the album her transitions between singing and speaking are very natural, flowing without the listener really being aware of the join. In the notes she reveals her family name before she adopted her nom-de-chanteuse, and she closes the album, in French to a perky waltz tune, with a witty fast–worded tribute to her mother, Ma Maman Est Une Chanteuse.

      www.marilisorionaa.com



© 2007 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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