France de Griessen – Dawn Breakers

Radiant dawn
Dawn Breakers by France de Griessen is an elegant fourth album featuring ten songs resembling guitar and voice mantras and a discreet array of instruments. Love songs or impassioned prayers? Words bleed and ghosts hover. The clouds are savory like cotton candy and the snow is blue. Hybrid concepts and hallucinations coexist in France’s work, which forges chimerical links, weaves invisible threads, and reverses meaning and the senses. Referencing Salvador Dalí’s Aphrodisiac Telephone or Max Ernst’s A Week of Kindness, France’s witch folk flows through the body and lifts souls.

I’ll Be Your Mirror
Inspired by Johnny Thunders’ acoustic punk ballads and Barbet Schroeder’s cinematic dreaminess (especially the intriguing La Vallée, 1972), France de Griessen pays homage to Donovan’s “hopeful melancholy,” Marie Laforêt’s neo-medieval litanies, and underground icon Nico’s incantatory refrains and poetry drawn from the English Romantics, that open metaphysical doors. These qualities are fully applicable to Dawn Breakers, recorded in the countryside in Somerset, in Wells, the smallest town in England, “just like in fairy tales and books.”

Beloved witch
An interdisciplinary artist and a witch of “sound symbolism,” allowing herself to use “enchanting, soothing, tense, dreamlike” sounds, she sometimes sings in duet with New York anti-folk artist Cannonball Statman. Compositions and magic formulas like sacred rituals invented to “break free from norms, bring darkness into the light to transform it and travel through time.” There is something prayer-like about France, “in the universal sense, a quest for the elevation of the soul towards the universe and nature. “A broad sense field” that allows the body and mind to vibrate and interconnect.

Hyper-presence
“Music, along with theater, is the most cathartic art form. It’s not about ‘putting your guts on the table,’ but about seeking a state of hyper-presence. It is from this state that the light comes.” Are her songs impassioned declarations? Cries (sometimes literally) due to internal suffering? Her lyrics are evocative of treasure chests and hiding places: “The album track July, for example, is about the voices I hear in my head, those of ancient stories that rise to the surface with intensity, sometimes to deliver a message, and clash with each other.”

A style that is both simple and intense, powerful emotions set to music. France quotes Louise Bourgeois – “I have been to hell and back and let me tell you, it was wonderful“ – and asserts her individuality and her appetite for mystery, contemplation and fantasy, flamboyance, a sense of provocation and the ”indefinite divisibility” of her actions.

Otto e mezzo
The short musical film Blue Snow accompanies the release of her first single. Shot in Italy and directed by Cannonball Statman, it references, among other things, pedinamento, or the “pursuit” of the protagonist by the camera, in a chiaroscuro stroll. France’s relationship with Italian cinema (particularly that of Pasolini, Fellini, and Antonioni) is strong, “with its poetic wanderings, syncretism, symbols, complex heroes and heroines, and striking visual compositions like moving paintings.”