Thursday 10 February 2011



Leap year

My introduction to Christine Fellows and Les femmes de chez nous

(photo: Sheila Spence)

I’ve been staring at my computer screen for almost 20 minutes, with an ever-increasing sense of inadequacy as I try to write a post about Christine Fellows and her new album, Les femmes de chez nous.   First off, this is my introduction to Fellows, even though the record is her fifth as a solo artist, so I don’t have a musical/historical context to place it in.  I know it shouldn’t matter very much (it wouldn’t be the first time I wrote about an artists who’s previous work I was unfamiliar with), but about 3 songs into Les femmes de chez nous I felt as if I had just discovered that a secret room in my own house, filled with treasures, that I never knew existed, but has been there all along.

Les femmes de chez nous is a 13-song cycle chronicling the lives of a group of women who, on the surface, don’t seem to share any commonalities, but are all “our gals”.  Songs about canoeing nuns, a small town stenographer who becomes a beauty queen, mermaids, and runaways flow seamlessly into each other, picking up loose story-lines and threading them together to form a magnificent tapestry that is truly an impressive and expansive work of art.  Along with it comes the film Reliquary/Reliquaire, a multidisciplinary performance work produced by Fellows, that feature four female voices, piano, two cellos, overhead projections and film, and beautifully showcasing Fellows’ work as both a visual and musical artist.

It’s all too much to take in at once, a vast undertaking that requires repeated listens and many viewings to appreciate just how easily Fellows connects these series of seemingly random dots.  I have quite completely absorbed it all myself, but know that I’m going to enjoy this feast for the eyes and ears for many days to come.

Les femmes de chez nous is available now, packaged together with the DVD of Reliquary/Reliquaire on Six Shooter Records.

MP3: Christine Fellows “Leap Year”





by J. Di Gioia | Comments Off

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 at 8:35 am and is filed under MP3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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