{"title":"Eric Chenaux Trio","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"delights-of-my-life","title":"Delights Of My Life","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDelights Of My Life\u003c\/i\u003e opens a new chapter for the singer\/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux’s solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux’s own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn many ways \u003ci\u003eDelights Of My Life\u003c\/i\u003e also picks up right where Chenaux’s previous album left off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplay of the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux’s spartan home studio in rural France, Driver’s harmonically warped organ and Melanson’s electroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previously Chenaux relied on a freeze\/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate both pulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive and intricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (including orchestral timbres like timpani, kettle drums, and woodblock) that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic. Driver also ramps up his role in the song arrangements (prefigured in his support playing on Say Laura), teasing out chords and melodic filigree on Wurlitzer that percolate more prominently with Chenaux’s signature fried guitar solos and succulent singing. Both trio members add dulcet backing vocals, most notably on the 10-minute tour-de-force of fuzzed and ring-modulated swing “This Ain’t Life” that opens the record. All seven songs on the album groove and sway, simmer and sparkle, like nothing in the inestimable Chenaux discography to date.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChenaux’s tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you’ve heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant\/out-music lens. \u003ci\u003eDelights Of My Life\u003c\/i\u003e conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor Chet Baker, Jim O’Rourke, Billie Holiday, Derek Bailey, Jeff Parker, Mary Halvorson, David Grubbs. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Constellation","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50422173925707,"sku":"2192094","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50422173532491,"sku":"2192093","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Eric_Chenaux_Trio_-_Delights_Of_My_Life_43102eb2_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726763061"},{"product_id":"sloppy-ground","title":"Sloppy Ground","description":"\u003cp\u003e'sloppy ground' is eric chenaux's strongest, most accessible and mosy dynamic work in years. this is a collection of beautifully fried love songs, highly original in compositional approach and instrumental texture, utterly compelling in lyrical content and delivery. standout tracks are the opening swirling drone ballad 'am i lonely', the frazzled funk of 'love don't change' and 'rest your daylights' which is a truely gorgeous twilight lullaby. on 180 gram vinyl on constellation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"No Label","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50491012514123,"sku":"298361","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/b3b74912-7b8c-4ba1-9de7-ea1ea5cfdcd7_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727680519"},{"product_id":"skullsplitter","title":"Skullsplitter","description":"\u003cp\u003eEric Chenaux has emerged as one of the most distinctive, innovative and original voices in what might be called avant-garde balladry, juxtaposing his gorgeously pure and open singing against a guitar sound and style that truly stands alone. Skullsplitter is the impressive new album that confirms Chenaux's singular aesthetic: genuine, natural, unaffected vocals gliding through slow, smoky melodies while electric and nylon-string guitars are deployed with adventurously experimental, dextrous, semi-improvisational technique and texture. Skullsplitter stands as a welcome evolution from Chenaux's previous song-based album Guitar \u0026amp; Voice (2012), which was widely celebrated as his best work to date, championed by The Wire, Said The Gramophone, Stereophile and others for its unique sensibility and sensitivity. Skullsplitter builds on these strengths, with Chenaux working his concise array of signal-bending devices (volume, wah and freeze pedals) with a remarkable and idiosyncratic fluidity that's integral to the expressivity he brings to the guitar, and his voice at the calm center of this stormy micro-climate of bodily kinetics and woozy playing. On Skullsplitter, Chenaux's vocals are like a high pressure system, riding on clear bright air, stabilizing the roiling, changeable atmosphere of the guitars underneath; a gem of an album in an increasingly luminous discography.​180g LP includes art print poster and download coupon.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Constellation","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50493451108683,"sku":"384945","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50493455302987,"sku":"384944","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2593f2c9-fe74-46bf-b4b9-e6ce15a5ea51_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727697935"},{"product_id":"slowly-paradise","title":"Slowly Paradise","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor overs of Richard Dawson, John Fahey, Derek Bailey, Richard Youngs and Billie Holiday. Eric Chenaux makes conceptual music that’s not meant to sound conceptual. He operates among various ‘traditions’ but perhaps most broadly, Chenaux’s records grapple with the relationship between improvisation and structure in very particular, unique, idiosyncratic ways – and quite without irony or cynicism, through love. Because fundamentally, Chenaux writes love songs, which he sings in a voice honeyed and clear, while his guitar gently bends, frazzes, chortles, diverges and decomposes. This juxtaposition of his mellow, dexterous crooning and his highly experimental (and equally dexterous) guitar explorations, explodes even unconventional notions of singing and accompaniment, of tonal and timbral interplay between guitar and voice. As a solo artist, Chenaux’s improvisation methods are in certain literal ways solipsistic: as a singer-songwriter, he plays his guitar around and against his voice, challenging easy notions of harmony \/ harmoniousness, improvising ‘with himself’ in pursuit of surprising himself (and his listeners) as he unfurls ribbons of voice and instrument often to the point of seeming independence, all the better to capture – and be captured by – unforeseen, intimate moments of interdependence: a definition of freedom, as a profoundly intentional state of openness, presence and play. Even within avant-garde currents of folk and jazz balladry, Eric Chenaux feels like an outlier. Yet his music remains wonderfully warm, generous and fundamentally accessible in spite of its irrefutable iconoclasm. \u003ci\u003eSlowly Paradise\u003c\/i\u003e is Eric Chenaux’s new solo record. It is a lovely collection of mostly long songs guided by soothing, buttery singing and bent, fried fretwork. It is arguably Chenaux’s most assured and essential solo work, building on the critical acclaim his previous releases \u003ci\u003eGuitar and Voice\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSkullsplitter\u003c\/i\u003e have rightly garnered. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - 180 Gram Vinyl includes 12x24 art print poster and Download. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Constellation","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50497132560715,"sku":"1027869","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/c71d799f-c817-448a-a5e5-a571c6b3711d_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727726465"},{"product_id":"say-laura","title":"Say Laura","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e Say Laura\u003c\/i\u003e is the follow-up to \u003ci\u003eSlowly Paradise\u003c\/i\u003e (2018) which landed Chenaux on the cover of The Wire among other accolades. The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. Say Laura perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on Say Laura bring Chenaux's semi-improvised but keenly intentional songwriting to its fullest, clearest, warmest and coolest articulation; uncompromising and generous, hyper-specific and loose, spartan and luxurious, elemental and ornate. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Constellation","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50829779960139,"sku":"1142482","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/95588223-8985-437c-9572-591eae9f9958_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1731527391"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/eric-chenaux-trio.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}