À Feu Doux is the forthcoming new release from Kevin Fowley, a Franco-Irish musician based in Dublin. His bio reveals that, while growing up, he split his time between living in France and Ireland. He listened to French lullabies sung by his mother in one room while his father would be playing Donegal tunes on the fiddle in another. “I’m lucky to have been brought up bilingual and bicultural,” he says. “What I find interesting is that I usually think in English, but if I intentionally start thinking in French, a markedly different side of my personality comes through, encouraging different thought patterns.”
On À Feu Doux, Fowley presents four songs – French lullabies and traditional folk songs dating as far back as the 14th century. These songs were sung to Fowley and his siblings when they were children. His mother and grandmother would sing them to him as they were passed down yet another generation to him. Then, a few years ago, Fowley’s grandparents made a book for his nieces, a collection of 122 French songs and nursery rhymes. Soon enough, Fowley found himself reconnecting with those songs that soundtracked his childhood and began shaping them into the foundations of À Feu Doux.
Below, you can watch the accompanying self-shot video for Ne Pleure Pas, Jeannette. Watching Kevin lost in his thoughts, enjoying his continental breakfast, is strangely in balance with the song’s feel. The recordings are contemporary and have an almost hypnotic effect on the listener, like remembering childhood memories that become slowly reshaped and blurred across the vast fields of time. On Ne Pleure Pas, Jeannette, Fowley is joined by Ross Chaney on synths, samplers, modular processing and Caimin Gilmore on double bass (who also played on the recent Lemoncello debut). Nothing is rushed; shimmering atmospheric vibes allow you to linger between verses, and some lovely double bass moments conjure late-night jazz moments.
There’s also a sense of melancholy to Ne Pleure Pas, Jeannette, a tragic tale about a young woman who wants to marry a man who is imprisoned and faces being hanged; as Basin Rock say, “it sets the tone for the release that contains all the dreamy, late-night hypnotic associations with lullaby music.”
As mentioned above, these songs were sung to Fowley and his siblings when they were young; he maintains that sibling connection here through the artwork, created here by Kevin’s sister, Moïra Fowley. It is striking, and like the music, dreamlike…teetering between the comfort of sleep and nightmarish dreams, folkloric illustrations that wouldn’t be out of place in those original nursery rhyme books.
Varnished and exposed is the feeling that floats through À Feu Doux like a gentle gust of wind creeping in through the open window at night. Real night time music.
Basin Rock
Pre-order À Feu Doux via Basin Rock (Vinyl) | Bandcamp (releases 26 July 2024)
https://kevinfowley.wordpress.com