Photo by Sylvestre Nonique-Desvergnes
There is a profound moment, in talking to Eric Chenaux about his 13 favourite albums, when the Canadian musician takes a few seconds to breathe and gather his tumbling thoughts about a particular performance from one of his great heroes, the avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey. “It sounds like nature is playing it,” he says.
An alignment with the natural world – unknowable, unpredictable, with capacity for both bewilderment and life-affirming awe – is perhaps fair for Chenaux’s own idiosyncratic, and longstanding, output. Across heralded albums such as Say Laura, Slowly Paradise and Skullsplitter, among many, his is a music that unhurriedly toys with disconnection and disorientation, but amid this his songs frequently unfold into a revelatory kind of lucid bliss, before again entering a melodic and harmonic wilderness. Absorbing Chenaux’s unearthly voice as it straddles his skewed jazz-folk-soul-pop-inflected style, it recalls Tim Buckley’s Luciano Berio-influenced experiments with the Lorca album (though Chenaux is much gentler). Various Arthur Russell-isms emerge too, as do many elements from avant-garde composers and improvisers – something reflected in this Baker’s Dozen.
Chenaux’s newest work is the forthcoming Delights Of My Life, released as the Eric Chenaux Trio. The singer and songwriter is joined by long-time friend and collaborator Ryan Driver on organ, and percussionist Phil Melanson.
“I’d been playing solo and recording solo for over a decade, and I was getting pretty comfortable with that,” says Chenaux, speaking from his home in rural France. “And I just felt ready to share the process of making music – this music specifically, [as opposed to the music] I make with other people. After making so many records where every sound was, for the most part, something I had made, I wanted to hear sounds that I didn’t physically make.”
Delights Of My Life is, though, no great departure for Chenaux. That abiding meandering, exploratory quality remains, as does a captivating lyrical landscape that sometimes feels underappreciated in his oeuvre. There is a flavour of mid-20th-century American poetry to his verse: perhaps the excitable urbanity of Frank O’Hara, or the focus on phonetic rhythms and breath of the Black Mountain school – thanks to an intriguing compositional process in collaboration with Driver.
“It’s kind of a game. We are not sitting there looking at each line wondering what would be a nice thing to have. We’re translating sounds that I’ve made. He’s creating words out of sounds, and then I’m looking at what he’s written, and finding holes. It’s this very surreal game. I think that we’re both in some ways searching for things that we don’t know.”
As for the new textures brought by the trio set-up, Chenaux does not hear any great transformative impact on the overall sound. “I mean, besides that it has drums that change the dynamic of how the rhythm is propelled. But Ryan and I play somewhat similarly, we have a similar interest in certain kinds of harmonies, melodies and landscapes. For me, [the album] sounds very much like all my music sounds.”
Which leads us to the qualities he enjoys in the music of others, and the common ground across the 13 albums selected here. “I’m a big fan of people who seem to be rewriting or remaking the same piece over and over again. The details that differentiate the pieces when people’s practices are such, interest me very much. I feel a fidelity to those kinds of differences.”
And Chenaux took a relatively novel approach to selecting this Baker’s Dozen, which includes albums ranging from 1959 to 2023. There is not much nostalgia to be found here.
“All I did was look at YouTube Music and the last 25 records I listened to, and chose 13. In fact, I chose one I hadn’t even listened to yet.”
Delights Of My Life by Eric Chenaux Trio is released on 31 May via Constellation / Murailles Music.
To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click the image below.
