L'Oiseau Magnifique

Les Disques Bongo Joe are pleased to announce the new album of Alice ! After a first release on tape with Ripopée, the Geneva-based trio strikes back with L’Oiseau Magnifique, a playful and poignant blend of intricate harmony and storytelling lyricism. The project is awaited February 3rd, but you can already download the full album. Follow the link bellow !

Armed with a thrift-store synth, bizarre wit and arresting vocals, the intergenerational, all-female micro-choir Alice releases a mammoth 23 track album. Alice’s music subverts French and Occitan folk music to create a unique sound that combines art-pop, folk song vocals and synth experiments.

Formed in 2018, Alice is the brainchild of artists Lisa Harder, Yvonne Harder, and Sarah André. The group draws on their experience of intuitive singing at home and with friends and family, as well as Yvonne and Lisa’s history of performance in choirs and Sarah’s story­telling career as an author of graphic novels. With mother and daughter Yvonne and Lisa playing the keyboard in unison and all three of them singing along with intuitively harmonised words, Alice’s music produces a choral polyphony from just three voices, while sharp lyrics reflect on universal emotions and the poignant moments of their everyday lives alike.

Each track on the record is a document of a moment or experience in the past year of Alice’s lives, traversing the humourous story of ending up at a disappointing party on La Fête Nulle, to the foot-stomping hand claps of La Décapotable, which drily comments on people who cruise the highway in a convertible and try to pretend they are having fun, and the multiplying word associations of Fil à Recoudre, which plays as a tribute to the unfailingly optimistic people who will let you know there’s no such thing as bad weather.

Exploring the new spaces that this shared creativity has unearthed, Alice creates beguiling music from the humble origins of just voice and keys. In their minimal combination, the trio produces everything from the neoclassical funereal dirge of Petit et Gris, to the soaring melodic melancholia of Oiseaux Magnifique, and the 20-second chanted crescendo of La Lune. Theirs is a singular sound that momentary experiences and their stays with you – songs that you of their crystalline vocal power and delves deep into the beauty of underlying emotions. It is one that will want to play again and again.