Françoiz Breut
What do shadows dance to? ... Not to the music in the room — to the light ... Move the lamp and the whole floor changes partners ... The title of this song is a small joke of that kind, and the record it comes from is called Zoo, and Françoiz Breut, who draws pictures for children's books when she is not singing, filled it with mostly sweet animals ...
She has been making French songs for more than twenty years, quietly, at the edge of pop, with a voice that tells rather than sells ... For Zoo, her sixth record, out in 2016, she did something unexpected ... she gave the songs to Adrian Utley of Portishead to produce, a man who had spent his life making music sound like a dark room ...
From a French reviewer who listened closely ... the record is voice and guitars in conversation, not voice over accompaniment — her longtime guitarist Stéphane Daubersy playing through effects pedals he built himself — and the keyboards make the sound of a cracked toy ... That is the room the shadows dance in ... A guitar that was rewired at a kitchen table, a keyboard that sounds like a cracked toy, and a storyteller's voice moving the lamp ...
Breut is a conteuse, the reviewer wrote — a teller of tales, someone who makes parallel worlds out of small moments of a life ... This is one of the small moments ... a wall, a light, a shape on the wall that moves when nothing else does ...