Oiapok - Oisolün CD
SKU
OMR 002-2
Etienne Agard: Trombone
Fréderic Durrmann: Trombone, whistling
Mélanie Gerber: Vocals
Guillaume Gravelin: Harp
Clarissa Imperatore: Xylophone, Vibraphone, Flutes, Percussions
Matthieu Lenormand: Drums
Valentin Sylvain Metz: Guitars
Pierre Wawrzyniak: Bass
Oiapok is the follow-up band to the well-liked, formerly on AltrOck French ensemble Camembert and some of the players from Camembert appear here (you think Harp players grow on trees?).
The music is different and more vocally based, but it’s definitely not a huge break stylistically from Camembert and is just as great, if great in a different way. Recommended!
“A product of the new French scene, OIAPOK is the missing link between future jazz, progressive rock, exotica, and the music of Frank Zappa.
Oiapok is the result of the artistic crush between Pierre Wawrzyniak (compositions, bass), Guillaume Gravelin (harp, arrangements), and Mélanie Gerber (vocals). Quickly an original, eclectic, poetic, refined, and powerful music was born out of inspiration from travels, literary works, and societal cries.
Oiapok is now releasing its first album, OisoLün: a humanist, ecological and committed manifesto. OisoLün is a chimera, an exotic bird, the last representative of its species, flying over an environmentally ravaged world.
The album songs are based on an atypical instrumentation (harp, mallet percussions...), a unique voice between Lisa Gerrard and Björk, musical colors coming from the five continents, and chiseled arrangements reviving the exotica and the space age, the whole played over modern grooves spanning from nu soul to jungle.
Tracks such as Frogs Might Disappear, a drum’n’bass tale of a dystopian future without batrachians, and Les Grands Equipages de Lumière, an adaptation of a French science-fiction short story by Michel Demuth, make OisoLün a dancing and romantic journey between the earth and the stars.
The word «Oiapok» is a neologism, a semantic shifting between the Guyanese river Oyapock, the cradle of fearless adventurers, a wild, exciting and dangerous place, and the belt of the Chariclo asteroid, Oiapoque, whose orbit crosses that of the outer planets of the solar system.
The group dedicated its first single (July 2019) to Raymond Maufrais, a French explorer who died near the Oyapock river in 1950...”