Laura Cahen
Approximately three films are folded into this song and nobody would know unless she told them ... She did ... In Poussière, Laura Cahen said, she is talking about The Piano, about Darkest Hours, about Chernobyl — a woman and her instrument on a beach, a country in a bunker, a town that had to be left in an afternoon ... Dust, the title says ... The thing all three leave behind ...
She is a French singer who plays her own guitar and keyboards, and the record this is on, Une Fille — A Girl — came out in May 2021 ... It is her second ... She made it with Dan Levy, half of the duo The Dø, who has a way of putting a warm electronic floor under a voice without drowning it ... The film references run all through the album, she said ... she watches, and the watching turns into songs ...
Poussière is what settles after something has happened ... with a piano, in a city, to a life ... The song does not tell those three stories ... it borrows their light ... You do not need to have seen the films ... you need to have stood in a room after someone mysterious left it ...
The measure of it is Levy's floor ... a singer-songwriter's guitar and voice carried on electronic production that stays out of the way, how a good projectionist stays out of the way ... So the record sounds like a woman alone in a cinema after the picture, still sitting there while the dust drifts through light beams ...