It is ML’s capsized heart that offers its guiding line to this first EP – the premise of an album to come. A tender and intrepid heart, frightened, however, at the edge of the unknown ground, but determined to make its way there, clearing the brambles and straddling the ruts to tell the inner upheavals with transparency.
ML, two letters, two initials for Maria-Laetitia Mattern, one of the pillars of Sonnfjord, a rhythmic pop trio she set up with her brother Aurelio Mattern, and a friend of theirs, Francois de Moffarts, in their home town, Brussels. But Maria-Laetitia, who hates change, needed a new breath, to express her deepest self. Exit the English of Sonnfjord’s lyrics, and make way for French on a first solo EP. Like a will to say, finally, the intimacy of doubts and torments in his mother tongue. “When I started to write in French, I lined up metaphors. Then I clarified my meaning. Now I try to write what I think, not in the most direct way possible but in a rather simple way. A simplicity all in poetry, turned with sharpness and sense of melody. ML shoots pieces like arrows in the heart.
The road of his compositions in guitar-voice crosses that of the Frenchman Ambroise Willaume, passed by the group Revolver before embarking in solo under the alias Sage while producing for others (Clara Luciani, notably). The back and forth between Brussels, where Maria-Laetitia lives, and Sage’s Parisian studio gives her structure and an electro-pop scope without ever masking the power of her own melodies, which touch the body and the heart like multi-colored spinning tops.
“I like fragility and not posturing. That’s why I’m a fan of Leonard Cohen. With this album, I try to be there without lying” says ML, who also cherishes Lana Del Rey, Patti Smith, Eels or Elliott Smith. “I like seriousness in music. If I were to use a second degree, I would feel like I wasn’t expressing my feelings. Seriousness but without pathos, always with a form of dancing lightness that make his tracks as many addictive ritornellos.
In duet on the EP Nuit Noire, the title “Changé” mixes the voices of Maria-Laetitia and Flore Benguigui, singer of L’Impératrice, to celebrate “the clouds that are always changing face”. On the starry Nuit noire, the one who suffers from insomnia and therefore writes at night more than during the day calls “the dark night for help”. Un peu plus haut questions the Truman Show side of the world in which ML feels she is evolving, and the pressing desire to escape from it. The misty Divagation tells a beautiful reverie tinged with the blue of a river, the color of the eyes of the loved one.
