Benjamin Schoos - Night Music, Love Songs (2016) FLAC

Belgian-born Francophile Benjamin Schoos doesn't sleep much. Instead he spends his nights thumbing through novels in front of the black-and-white flicker of old science-fiction movies, swimming in the stillness and hush of a world outside momentarily calm. It was in this "nocturnal ambience", as he calls it, that his latest selection of piano-led Parisian pop songs came to him; each one like a slow kiss amid the madness of Belleville patisserie. 'Night Music, Love Songs', is Schoos' fourth solo album, and features haunting synths and melodies that glisten and waver like street lights in the Seine. It strips back his sound of old (such as his memorable collaboration with Laetitia Sadier on the stirring 'Je NeVois Que Vous') to bare, affecting essentials - a lilting listen full of warm, misty-eyed romance that questions what it is to love someone. Influences on this record are the glacial minimalism of Erik Satie, the pre- and post-war French chanson of Charles Trenet and Henri Salvador, and elsewhere "soft jazz and sunshine pop". "It's an intimate album," admits Schoos - maybe his most intimate yet. "It mixes delicate flavours of nostalgia with intense sentimental reverie...