This is Angèle David-Guillou's first album using her real name. She has previously recorded solo albums as Klima and collaborated under this moniker with Piano Magic and The Go!Team (on Rolling Blackouts).
The move into classically tinged ambience is a subtle variation on what she's done before with the most radical difference being the absence of vocals.
The album features twelve tracks, most of which are instrumentals built around the elegant classical tones of the grand piano.
It opens with the brooding drama of Anti Atlas followed by the more sprightly Hesperides in which discrete violin is deployed to delicately flesh out the sound.
The addition of strings, together with minimalist percussion, also gives a Baroque touch to Kuril and And The Grass Was Singing, the title of the latter being taken from the Doris Lessing novel.
There are fragments of lines using the voice as instrument on But Now I Am Joyful and Our Garden but the title track is the only 'orthodox' song here.
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This is named after Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma whose most famous novel, Allah Is Not Obliged, is the story of a child soldier. The track is billed as a protest ballad in which she plaintively sings the line: "We are not alone, one by one our time will come".
As the album title suggests, the influence of art of literature is strong throughout. Dream Of Leonor Fini is a homage to the Argentine surrealist painter while L'Enfer C'est Les Autres takes it title from Jean-Paul Sartre's cynical maxim - Hell is other people.
Personally, I'd have preferred to hear more of David-Guillou's melodious singing but the delicacy and charm of these piano tunes offer a resonant classical alternative to her usual dream pop.
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