Melanie De Biasio

Melanie De Biasio – Il Viaggio (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:22:32 minutes | 848 MB | Genre: Easy Listening, Ambient
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © [PIAS] Le Label

Il Viaggio is an offering, a quest for musical, physical, and spiritual renewal, born from an emotional memory awakened. Joining the concrete and ambient, it drifts from the natural sounds of a new day towards a dreamed world. Taking to the road to reinvent oneself is the common thread running through this album, which is organized as a sonic journey in two parts, Lay Your Ear To The Rail (Disc 1) and The Chaos Azure (Disc 2).

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Melanie De Biasio – Il Viaggio (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:22:26 minutes | 1,46 GB | Genre: Pop, Rock, Alternatif et Indé
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover

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Melanie De Biasio – No Deal (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:35 minutes | 397 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Play It Again Sam

Tasteful, subtle and inscrutable, Belgium’s Melanie De Biasio and the band have made one of the few modern vocal jazz records. The singer, who also plays flute on the album, which she studied at the Conservatoire Royal De Bruxelles – was born in Charleroi, Belgium, to an Italian family originally from Venice and grew up listening to Maria Callas, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Jeff Buckley and Rage Against The Machine. But you wouldn’t necessarily infer such diverse influences from No Deal. It’s a record that she produced herself and is steeped in the language of blues and jazz. “No Deal” is a dark, transcendent songs that seem to suspend time.

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Melanie De Biasio – Lilies (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:33 minutes | 374 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © [PIAS] Le Label

“For Lilies I just wanted to retreat to a cave with my Pro-Tools, my computer, and my cheap, 100Euro Shure SM-58 microphone. I could have gone to a big studio, made a big production – but I wanted none of that. I wanted to go back to the seed of creativity, the simplest materials. I was in this room where there was no light, no night or day at all, no heat. Very uncomfortable. But I felt free. I was happy to have this feeling – ‘I don’t need more, I have everything I need here.’” The spirit and the context in which Melanie De Biasio created Lilies are certainly in keeping with this unique artist’s life and work… A singer-musician who is always ready to question and challenge herself anew and push the boundary markers which are so often set down between musical genres. Released in 2013, her album No Deal excelled as an atmospheric meeting of jazz, electro and rock. The Belgian who worships Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln took another departure from the beaten track with what is commonly called vocal jazz, and wandered towards soul, trip hop, blues: into the most impalpable of ethers. In these weightless sequences, Lilies is firmly stamped with the De Biasio hallmark. This is a way of doing away with labels and playing with light and dark, day and night.

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Melanie De Biasio – Blackened Cities (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 24:16 minutes | 280 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © [PIAS] Le Label

When Melanie De Biasio released No Deal in 2014, it was embraced by jazz critics, DJs, and club audiences simultaneously. Gilles Peterson was so taken with its monochromatic ambient textures, stark arrangements, and clever improvisational intimations that he commissioned an album of remixes. Blackened Cities is not a conventional follow-up, but an adventurous endeavor rife with risk. The release consists of a single 24-minute track that unfolds like a suite. The conservatory-trained Belgian vocalist and flutist and her longtime musical associates — Pascal Mohy on piano, Pascal Paulus on analog synths and clavinet, and Dré Pallemaerts on drums (with guest double bassist/cellist Sam Gerstmans) — deliver a full-scale sonic drama that crosses a wide musical expanse and evokes an encyclopedia of stylistic references, yet comes across as a totally original whole. Its title comes from impressions of postindustrial cities De Biasio visited on her international tour: Detroit, Manchester, her native Charleroi; each has a storied past and a devastated façade, yet reflects its own unique beauty and tenacity. Recorded live in the studio, Blackened Cities began as an unfinished three-minute idea brought in by the singer and left open for group interpretation. It starts with a whisper, a single organ-esque chord followed by a cello, before its lone guidepost enters: Pallemaerts’ nearly constant, always inventive drumming — shuffling, syncopating, circling — is the pulse that signals each wave-like segment. (The spirit of Tony Williams on Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way is redolent.) The musical reference points are wildly diverse: Nina Simone (the cover of “I’m Gonna Leave You” on No Deal was a watermark), the piano vamp from the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” Julie Tippetts with Brian Auger, Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, Simin Tander, Annette Peacock, Portishead, The The’s “Uncertain Smile,” Judy Nylon, and more come and go unhurriedly. The work gradually builds and then builds some more, without ever ratcheting up in intensity. Even at its most improvisational, Blackened Cities retains its moody, spatial, and spectral sense of groove. De Biasio delivers her lyrics in flowing extensions and deconstructions; the instrumental themes emerge from and vanish into them. Her unique phrasing employs the same maxims of silence and space that her musicians do. Even her own flute break uses an economic palette, elastically balancing harmony with breath. But in its creative leap, Blackened Cities retains all of the appealing elements heard on No Deal. As the track eventually washes into silence, it becomes evident that it had to stand as its own release. This aural travelogue’s sensual cool, brooding tension, and elegiac tenderness are inseparable from one another. It is complete, but even at this length Blackened Cities ends all too soon. ~ Thom Jurek

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