Jibcae is an onomatopoeia, a word that came up in an exercise of automatic writing on a keyboard. Jibcae is also the intimate and vulnerable face of a SwissFrench singer known for her inspiring collaborations with multiple other artists. And then, Jibcae is a record, the saved trace of an inner voice making her way out to the exterieur. Claire Huguenin is the exorcist of this voice. She plays with her organ from murmur to unleashed song and dives into her sentiments, her emotions. In her fragile but powerful ways the singer pulverises many genres, from Jazz to Cabaret often passing through Folcloric sounds. The dialogue between Malcom Braff on the piano, Julie Campiche on the harp and Jeremias Keller’s bass embodies this vertiginus and intense release.
BIOGRAPHY
Frank, authentic, inspired, liberated: it rains praising adjectives when the name of the SwissFrench singer Claire Huguenin is mentioned within the Swiss music scene. Known for her diverse collaborations and participating in various pop or jazz projects, Claire Huguenin finally delivers her first solo album, Soul Farewell. It comes as an intimate and powerful portrait: “a maturing towards the inside, an introspection that has lead me to my most vulnerable and fragile, to the softest part of myself”, as the singer describes.
Jibcae
She named this abounding personal project Jibcae, after a spontaneous interjection that had rumored in her head for a while. Despite her young age, Claire Huguenin seems to have lived several lives already. The life of her childhood years, spent in a patchwork family with 10 siblings in Bulle, a small town in the canton of Fribourg where she woke up to the rhytmic sounds of her vietnamese nanny reciting her buddhist prayers. Claire lived the life of someone who had to deal with loss prematurely: She lost one brother to a congenital heart defect and another one in a tragic car accident. She was sitting in the car that ran him over. If premature loss is a thread, then premature success is another thread of her life that shaped her in an important way.
Claire was barely fifteen when she causes a stir in the Swiss and French music scene. It’s the millennium and her group of girlfriends manage an energetic pop sensation; their band Skirt is played with praise by Couleur3 and makes it to the Eurockéennes, one of France’s largest music festivals. “We didn’t think much about it actually, we mostly thought about getting our Baccalaureats and were consuming Nirvana, Björk and Walt Disney music” reminisces the singer. Skirt recorded a demo with four songs; the singer and guitarist Claire is named band leader without having sought this particular role. She gets her Bac and then signs up for Biology at University of Fribourg. That’s the end of Skirt.
Claire Huguenin becomes a teacher, feels out the life of a world traveler just to be caught up once again, by music. She gets accepted to the Conservatory of Belgium, gets a Bachelor of Arts in Vocals and follows up with a Master’s degree in composition from the Swiss Jazz School in Berne. Completely consumed by music, she gets training in sound engineering as well and cumulates many hours of collaborations in bands and music projects: mmmh! (alternative pop), Grimsvötn (jazz pop), AEIOU (electro pop), Greenwoman (mutant jazz), Kamikaze (synth pop). In 2014 she creates a multimedia show in collaboration with an Indian dancer titled “Guadalupe, The Girl with the Open Heart is You”
Multiple Voice Disorder
Claire Huguenin is fascinated by sounds, emotions and the quest of music. She is driven by a desire to make her voice dance on top of the instruments. For this first project under her own name she has paired with no less contagious musicians than her like the pianist Malcom Braff, guru of impossible rhythms, Julie Campiche, an unorthodox harpist, and Jeremias Keller, a bassist that gives the opus a tender foundation but still find his musical freedoms firing up lost chords.
In this first opus under her name and recorded live; the singer goes from finely chiseled pieces (« The Bad Layer ») to existential questions (Soul Farewell). Claire Huguenin evokes “an echo of the soul leaving the body”, she is touching on deep territory while conscious that her art is an outlet. The song “Caillou” reenacts her brother’s accident and points at that premature loss. She also doesn’t shy away from playing standards: “The Man I Love” by the Gershwin brothers or “Bonny at Morn” an american folk song that was rediscovered by the British composer Benjamin Britten are part of her repertoire.
Soul Farewell is essentially an innovative acoustic work that allows Claire Huguenin’s voice to wind around the scores of the piano; she scats, meows, murmurs and plays with harp arpeggios. Exploring corners of corners of her inner soul, mixing textures and genres, Claire Huguenin reveals the fragmented voice of her fragmentary identity. Nonclassifiable, non qualifiable she is shaped by other well known singers like Björk, Camilles and the big voices of Cabaret but still defies her own multiple personality. It’s a play of opposites, melancholic at times, then full of joy, energetic but stolid.
“Soul Farewell” comes out in April 2015 through the label Contemplate, an independent label in Berlin that has one strict culture; they approach music from an 360° spectrum. Contemplate publishes artists like Piers Faccini, Olivia Trummer, ADHD5.
