Arthur Chambry - La Seuz - LP

Arthur Chambry is a mysterious troubadour, walking the artistic crossroads of sound, poetry and theatre. Using a wide range of personalised gear to compose music, his is a viral energy: hiding and showing off behind the unexpected, playing gut-vibrating frequencies with violins, trumpets or lungs, fruits, pipes, or tapes.

His new album La Seuz draws a map of a parallel world made of singing peasants, luthiers, communities of musicians and mystical quests... Arthur carves out a place between traditional music and psychedelic folk. Listening to La Seuz you'll hear a wicked fusion between Moondog, Areski and a Breton bagpipe band.

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Welcome to The Seuz, a record of the forever extending and perpetually mutating open world traced out for us by contemporary pop troubadour Arthur Chambry.

Chambry’s diverse projects—musical compositions, writing and performances—describe a particular terrain: Rocronde, a semi-wild territory, rural and rustic, where a pervasive nature welcomes wandering, cross-bred, various beings, all of them pulsing with the breath and its magic tones: The Seuz. The ‘idiom of the wind’: breath, life, singing, expelling, sighing, coughing. All notions dear to Chambry, as can be heard in the legends that surround the Rocrondian world like a fog.

Chambry modulates and operates breath and wind using a range of home-made instruments. After five albums covering a wide array of sounds (from lo-fi collages to experimental pop), The Seuz gathers it all together, draping itself in pop-minstrel attire. Since his last album, Le Vent, l'Air, et l'Atmosphère, (2020, Cindy Tapes), Chambry has given attention to the making of solitary makeshift lo-fi dubious instruments: DIY chimes, high- and low-pitched membrane clarinets, a watering hose turned into a hunting horn...

The Seuz and its makeshift sounds brings you by turns up to the peaks and back down into the valley. The Seuz wanders steadily on quirky-medieval paths, while avoiding ‘bardcore’ pitfalls. Arthur Chambry slips into an analogue instrumental breach—no laptop post-production fuss—while inserting vocal spells (La Langue du Vent, Le Petit Bois) ready to shift you into the Party/Bonfire/Broche-style bbq lost-in-Mordor dimension. Betwixt Folk-RPGs and tempestuous minor epic tales, Les Pierres de Montodeau or Nos Soupirs show what Chambry has always known to do best: grasp the trend, the voids and the gaps to create a quasi-magical new sound.

To truly find The Seuz, seek for the Pastours (the deaf-mute giants of the land of Montodeau), pay attention and listen to the Azmate people (a community of wandering singers), bang the rocks of Montodeau and observe the vibrations that emanate. Everything unites into a massive tome of sound matter, verbatim, lyrical, and enchanted; that pulsating heart hidden within each being, each pebble or stream in the world of Rocronde, to which Chambry clearly belongs.


— Edouard Rose