Léonie Pernet
@Titouan Massé
Like diving into amniotic fluid, 28 years-old Léonie Pernet’s first album creates the dizzy feeling of endless nights. These nights spent boxing against oneself, not knowing if the morning is going to come. Crave: this record will be one of oppressive desire, clawed with shadows and flashes. An anxious desire that took three years for Léonie, since her first EP Two of Us, (Kill the DJ Records) to feel it, compose it and finally, share it. A record of restlessness, this album was composed in utter and sometimes toxic solitude, with only Alf (Stéphane Briat) coming in to sublimate the album through mixing. Léonie took her first steps as a drummer with Yuksek, cannot handle compromise and takes all her decisions alone: each of this record’s 11 titles was composed in a state of foetal obviousness and arranged in a studio in Barbès that could have been renamed “the intimate conviction”. A record of solitude therefore – but a populated solitude. Unique, Léonie is nonetheless a crowd. A crowd of talents, firstly. A drummer, pianist, and singer with a range that could do a split, Léonie is a kaleidoscope. A crowd of influences as well. While African Melancholia hints at Marilyn Manson’s mechanical animals, it is Klaus Nomi’s baroque spectrum that appears in Crave. Eleswhere, we find Mansfield.TYA’s aeral voices, memories of Jeanne Moreau, Rachmaninov or even Philip Glass, in the very mineral Caribou. A poem by François de Malherbe giving Rose his lyrics when, not far from it, the sublime Hanaa chants in Arabic the worry of being. Crave is a record of clashes. One must imaginate it like a journey through blue waters, full of hybrid and legendary creatures. Mixed amphibians, as Léonie’s life is. A trajectory made of successive dependency and freeing. After a turbulent schooling and a bachelor’s degree obtained as a very independent candidate, Léonie studied sacred arts and church music at university, while organizing her first night club events (les Corps VS Machines, chez Moune), mixed with an active political consciousness (between 2013 and 2016, she pitched online the poetic and militant Mix pour tous, Mix debout and Mix d’entre-deux-tours). A daily life made up of scratching electro, targeted anger and mystical wells of light which resembles the record she has created today. And then, especially then, there is the horizon. Léonie Pernet’s music, reverberated and cinematographic (she signed the sountrack of Cyprien Vial’s Bébé Tigre in 2015, and two songs in Anne Fontaine’s Marvin in 2017), is as spacious as it is a cult place. Her breathy voice, a call for air. The end of her songs, hidden doors. As locked-up as she is when composing, Léonie Pernet has a taste for opening exits, outros that take you elsewhere. When finishing listening to this record, as one gets out of a feverish insomnia, you may feel the wind of a lighter morning, light as a song, you who doesn’t want to say anything, you who tells me about her, of her nights, of our nights…
