Music

the ‘noir folk’ surrealism of montreal’s yves jarvis

December 12, 2018
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For years, Montreal-based singer-songwriter Jean-Sebastian Audet recorded intimate homemade music under the name, Un Blonde. His 2017 album, Good Will Come To You, is a wonderful example of bedroom-recorded spirituality (non-denominational) and one-man-band psychedelia. But when Jean-Sebastian felt it was a time for a change (“now, I don’t identify with [that name] at all,” he says), he turned towards a stage monicker that would bring him even closer to his music: Yves is Audet’s middle name, while Jarvis is his mother’s last name.

“fruits of disillusion” is Audet’s first music dropped as Yves Jarvis, and both the track and the pastoral Colin Medley-directed video that accompanies it, shows Audet to be keeping the aesthetic course, what he calls “noir folk.” It is an experimental, almost ambient song, with Jarvis’ voice crackling above layers of feedback and Rhodes keys, and an at-times-perceptible lyric about “searching” hitting like a transmission from a satellite heart.

One of the images in Medley’s lo-fi visual matches the tender isolation of the music. There’s Yves with a microphone attached to an old-fashioned tape recorder in what appears to be a forest clearing, but as the camera pans back, he is alone on a small land-rise in the middle of an enormous lake. It is not fancy, this notion of contemporary solitude, but it’s strong.

Yves Jarvis’ new album, The Same But By Different Means, will be out on ANTI- Records in March.

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