enrich: (verb) improve or enhance the quality or value of. ARTIST.....: Charlotte Gainsbourg TITLE......: Time Of The Assassins LABEL......: Because Music GENRE......: Folk RIP DATE...: 2019-04-10 RETAIL DATE: 2010-04-12 RUNTIME....: 22:12 TRACKS.....: 5 SIZE.......: 51.46MB QUALITY....: 320kbps 44.1kHz CODEC......: MP3 (MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) ENCODER....: LAME URL........: https://play.google.com/store/music/album?id=Bgfstrauniqponev7gf7eexvfgm Tracklist: ---------- 01. Time Of The Assassins 02:45 02. Time Of The Assassins (XXXChange Remix) 06:06 03. Time Of The Assassins (Outlines Remix) 03:54 04. Time Of The Assassins (Matthew Dear Remix) 04:15 05. Time Of The Assassins (Gentlemen Drivers Remix) 05:12 Notes: ------ Sometimes it takes a personal tragedy to catalyse an artist's practise, a crack in everything, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, that let's the creative light in. Just such a traumatic fissure occurred in Charlotte Gainsbourg's life in late 2013 with the sudden death in Paris of her half-sister, the fashion photographer Kate Barry. Reeling from the news and inevitably plunged into an extended period of grieving, the distressing event had transpired just as Charlotte was initiating activity on a new album, the successor to 2010's IRM. Rather than put a total brake on creative proceedings, however, the anguish would slowly but inexorably find expression in the pages of Charlotte's journal and thus, eventually, in the lyrics of the songs that she would write for Rest, her long-gestating but ultimately cathartic third studio album.The album's major production lynchpin would be French DJ, remixer and producer Sebastian Akchote-Bozovic, aka SebastiAn, best known for his releases on French house label Ed Banger and for his production work for Frank Ocean. His background in electronic music accorded with Charlotte's desire for a sound with a disquieting, mechanistic edge, inspired by Giorgio Moroder and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a revered, award- winning film actress, movie soundtracks, particularly Pino Donaggio's score for Brian De Palma's '70s horror classic Carrie and Georges Delerue's music for Jean-Luc Godard's nouvelle vague masterpiece Le Mepris, as well as the chilly, unsettling ambience of films like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Hitchcock's Rebecca.Although their initial plans to work together were interrupted by her sister's passing and a necessarily fractured subsequent transatlantic existence, the album would be recorded in France (A.S. Studio, Studio Palestine and Motorbass Studio), a Brooklyn basement and then at the legendary Electric Lady studio in Greenwich Village. Slowly freed from self-doubt by the need to express her grief, and with SebastiAn as her trusted lieutenant, Charlotte began to abandon her habitual protective armour and write with renewed candour, singing in both French and English (often both in the same song) and belatedly embracing elements of her Franco-British parents' distinctive, intimate musical style. "I wanted my voice to be quite present, the way that my father used to produce his albums", she explains, "but with this electronic sound that would hopefully make it distinctive. The inspiration of my parents' work was always there. SebastiAn wasn't trying to avoid it: he was trying to make it our own, but with my father always in the back of his head".The eleven essays on Rest are nothing if not sure-footed, proffering a compelling fusion of gleaming, string-emblazoned modern electro-pop and cinematically textured avant-chanson - their magical music box melodies kissed by bruised, introspective, occasionally disquieting lyrics. The album opens with the nursery rhyme enchantment of 'Ring a Ring a Roses', a hazy mosaic of nostalgic childhood snapshots - the verses delivered in intimately captured French, the instantly infectious chorus in coolly clipped English - and ends with the electro-disco-flavoured 'Les Oxalis' (named after the eponymous woodland flower). "Those two songs were always the bookends of the album", Charlotte explains. The latter's rhythmic energy cuts against the lyric, describing a lachrymose promenade through a cemetery. "I remember SebastiAn asking, 'Are you sure that's what you want to say against that rhythm?' But that's how this album made sense to me, in the contradiction between things, with the music taking you somewhere and the words going the opposite way".David Sheppard