“Water and dreams”: the grace of a clearing

Her relationship to time is elastic, “spaghetti” even, she says. Singer-songwriter Naomie de Lorimier, known for her solo project N NAO and her collaborations with Klô Pelgag and Laurence-Anne in particular, likes to think that time is a playground. this spontaneous and intuitive impulse to make music. When you make music, you have fun over time,” she points out. She believes, therefore, that she did not use a linear perspective of time for her last album with an equally nebulous title, Water and dreams. This also evokes the work of the same name by Gaston Bachelard, a contemplative essay on the imagination of dreams published in the XXe century. “It’s something that I deconstruct a lot, among other things because I draw inspiration from my dreams to create,” she explains.

At the time of writing and composing the very dreamy pop folk water and dreams, Naomie de Lorimier rushed to her guitar as soon as she emerged from a troubled sleep in order to take advantage of this almost subconscious state, “always a little in a trance”. “For me, when you’re in a dream, it’s very chaotic and it’s never very clear. Where are we ? When are we? » emphasizes the artist. The title Storm season is, for example, a very loaded piece, which she had trouble singing at first, because her nostalgia made her travel in the past.

Then, as if by magic, the meeting at Studios Greenroom with the co-producer of the album Jean-Bruno Pinard and the musicians Lysandre Ménard, Charles Marsolais-Ricard, Samuel Gougoux and Étienne Dupré happened one day. Without her and them, water and dreams would not exist, specifies Naomie de Lorimier. ” For Storm season, we installed microphones for everyone, and everyone followed my chords with their own instrument, improvising. We let it breathe. We started again. Repetition is important for me in music to reach this state of meditation and trance”, confides the artist. This moment of union and sweetness, with the piano notes of Lysandre Ménard, also helped her to appreciate the title in a whole new way.

Since time is an assemblage of moments, Naomie de Lorimier then continued the work. On his side. “I found myself at the chalet, where I made takes of voices that we can hear on the album today,” she recalls. The intimate and poetic song 11:11, with the great vibration of the deep and morning voice of the artist and his fingers on the acoustic guitar inspired by the repertoire of Vashti Bunyan, illustrates his point: “These are layers that are superimposed, ideas that have been added to each other to others because we had time. »

blooming witch

beyond time, 11:11 offers the singer-songwriter the possibility of manipulating superstitions. And to reveal a fantastic, almost bewitching facet of his music. “It may seem new-age, but I don’t care. I am interested in magic in all its aspects. Whether you believe it or not, it doesn’t matter, at 11:11 a.m. we are all thinking of someone and maybe that person is also thinking of us, ”she is convinced. For Naomie de Lorimier, these notions of silent communication and remote connection exist to make life more pleasant. “It’s essential to sprinkle touches of magic on reality,” she adds.

A bit like the magic that nature exerts over the seasons that follow one another, finally. “It all comes from my ecofeminist side and the importance I give to caring for nature,” she says. The one who was also a florist at the Jean-Talon Market in one of her previous lives is fascinated by magical phenomena, which would almost come from the sorcerer’s imagination, from nature. “The passage of the seasons, the color of plants and flowers inspire me enormously”, she continues. Both the forest and the water’s edge remain places of influence for the artist, where brilliance and great ideas combine.

“What I love in music and what we find in nature is transcendence. I always try to reach it in my songs,” notes Naomie de Lorimier. Making us feel like in a floating space out of time, which crosses all eras, is an effect that nature and music provide him. “Time is inherent in nature. It’s decline, it’s life, it’s death, it’s healing. It should be in water and dreams, because that’s what I’m looking for when I compose”, concludes the one who has at heart to sing in this perspective of paying particular attention to others, to herself, and to trust the process.

water and dreams

N NAO, Mothland. Available from March 24. Launch show at La Sala Rossa, April 26.

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