Enthusiastic Eunuch Presents
Eric Chenaux (Constellation Records)
with special guest
Patrick Stefan
The Workman’s Cellar
Wednesday 4th June
Tickets: €20 + BF
Eric Chenaux (Constellation Records)
Following the release of Eric Chenaux’s last album Say Laura (2022), The Guardian wrote “the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist.” With Uncut describing his songcraft “as delicate and lovely as a rare orchid” and Record Collector praising the album’s “sublime alien balladry” such are the accolades that have accrued to Chenaux’s unique and consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now.
Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux’s solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux’s own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.
In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux’s previous album left off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplay of the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux’s spartan home studio in rural France, Driver’s harmonically warped organ and Melanson’s electroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previously Chenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate both pulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive and intricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (including orchestral timbres like timpani, kettle drums, and woodblock) that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic. Driver also ramps up his role in the song arrangements (prefigured in his support playing on Say Laura), teasing out chords and melodic filigree on Wurlitzer that percolate more prominently with Chenaux’s signature fried guitar solos and succulent singing. Both trio members add dulcet backing vocals, most notably on the 10-minute tour-de-force of fuzzed and ring-modulated swing “This Ain’t Life” that opens the record. All seven songs on the album groove and sway, simmer and sparkle, like nothing in the inestimable Chenaux discography to date.
Chenaux’s tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you’ve heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant/out-music lens. Delights Of My Life conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind.
Patrick Stefan
Patrick Stefan is an award-winning Irish/Dutch songwriter from Co. Clare & Dublin.
Patrick released his debut album Wayfare in September 2022, an urban-folk document of Patrick's unique & colourful travels from Scandinavia, Brazil, to west Africa and back home. A once-Fulbright scholar, Patrick opted to follow the path of his father’s folk-singing- footsteps after building up an impressive list of collaborators like Niwel Tsumbu, rising stars Aby Coulibaly & Monjola, fiddler Martin Hayes (with the award-winning instrumental group Ensemble Ériu), Loah, Lisa Canny, Fehdah and 2017 Eurovision winner Luisa Sobral. After racking up 400k+ streams on 'Superman' - a star-studded 2020 soulful collaboration featuring Uly & Rob de Boer Patrick was tipped as by the likes of Nialler9, The Last Mixed Tape, and BBC’s Across The Line for his unique sound
Eric Chenaux (Constellation Records)
with special guest
Patrick Stefan
The Workman’s Cellar
Wednesday 4th June
Tickets: €20 + BF
Eric Chenaux (Constellation Records)
Following the release of Eric Chenaux’s last album Say Laura (2022), The Guardian wrote “the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist.” With Uncut describing his songcraft “as delicate and lovely as a rare orchid” and Record Collector praising the album’s “sublime alien balladry” such are the accolades that have accrued to Chenaux’s unique and consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now.
Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux’s solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux’s own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.
In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux’s previous album left off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplay of the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux’s spartan home studio in rural France, Driver’s harmonically warped organ and Melanson’s electroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previously Chenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate both pulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive and intricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (including orchestral timbres like timpani, kettle drums, and woodblock) that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic. Driver also ramps up his role in the song arrangements (prefigured in his support playing on Say Laura), teasing out chords and melodic filigree on Wurlitzer that percolate more prominently with Chenaux’s signature fried guitar solos and succulent singing. Both trio members add dulcet backing vocals, most notably on the 10-minute tour-de-force of fuzzed and ring-modulated swing “This Ain’t Life” that opens the record. All seven songs on the album groove and sway, simmer and sparkle, like nothing in the inestimable Chenaux discography to date.
Chenaux’s tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you’ve heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant/out-music lens. Delights Of My Life conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind.
Patrick Stefan
Patrick Stefan is an award-winning Irish/Dutch songwriter from Co. Clare & Dublin.
Patrick released his debut album Wayfare in September 2022, an urban-folk document of Patrick's unique & colourful travels from Scandinavia, Brazil, to west Africa and back home. A once-Fulbright scholar, Patrick opted to follow the path of his father’s folk-singing- footsteps after building up an impressive list of collaborators like Niwel Tsumbu, rising stars Aby Coulibaly & Monjola, fiddler Martin Hayes (with the award-winning instrumental group Ensemble Ériu), Loah, Lisa Canny, Fehdah and 2017 Eurovision winner Luisa Sobral. After racking up 400k+ streams on 'Superman' - a star-studded 2020 soulful collaboration featuring Uly & Rob de Boer Patrick was tipped as by the likes of Nialler9, The Last Mixed Tape, and BBC’s Across The Line for his unique sound
