Nathalie Joachim - Ki moun ou ye (2024) [Hi-Res]

By the time Nathalie Joachim released her groundbreaking 2019 album Fanm d’Ayiti, the flutist, composer, and singer had already spent decades studying and playing classical music. With that stunning work, she began opening up a huge part of her musical life that she’d kept largely private. Born to Haitian parents in New York, Joachim learned to sing on childhood visits to her ancestral homeland, where her maternal grandmother cemented their connection through the folk songs of the Caribbean country. “My earliest musical memories, and probably my real first music teacher, were my grandmother,” she says. Although Joachim had explored R&B in the song-driven flute duo Flutronix back in 2007, she largely put aside her wind instrument that led her to become a member of Chicago’s acclaimed Eighth Blackbird, and instead applied her remarkable voice to songs that had lived within her, adapting traditional Haitian tunes to sing in striking arrangement with the Chicago string ensemble Spektral Quartet. Soon after the Grammy-nominated album was released, the pandemic hit, and much of the momentum the recording generated was brought to a halt. But liberated by the experience, Joachim embraced the process she had unleashed. She began writing her own songs in Creole, and recording demos at home. “I became obsessed with this idea of sampling and making collage samples of little bits of my own voice. That became the central notion of the record. There are no two voices in the world that are exactly the same, but at the same time, it’s born of your DNA, so there’s maybe a piece of every single person who’s come before you. There’s something really fascinating to me about that. Could I use my voice as a vehicle to begin to understand who I am and begin to make ancestral connections that help me see a little bit more deeply who I am?” On her dazzling new album Ki moun ou ye, those home recordings are often at the core of the songs, which feature close friends like Sō Percussion co-founder Jason Treuting and former Eighth Blackbird violinist Yvonne Lam. Joachim produced the recordings, singing among clustered, richly harmonized parcels of her own sampled voice. A sampled recording of her grandmother’s voice lies at the heart of “Kenbe m,” which sounds much closer to Bjork than Bach. Joachim even plays flute, grappling with its classical tradition baggage as she breaks the mold of that practice. Joachim hasn’t turned her back on contemporary classical music, but for the first time in her career she’s found an outlet that allows her to express the full diapason of her interests and creativity.



Tracklist:
1.01 - Nathalie Joachim - Ki moun ou ye (5:20)
1.02 - Nathalie Joachim - Nan kò mwen (3:23)
1.03 - Nathalie Joachim - Fil (0:55)
1.04 - Nathalie Joachim - Kouti yo (4:09)
1.05 - Nathalie Joachim - Kenbe m (5:38)
1.06 - Nathalie Joachim - Renmen m plis (3:57)
1.07 - Nathalie Joachim - Nwa (1:59)
1.08 - Nathalie Joachim - Ti nèg (4:49)
1.09 - Nathalie Joachim - Kanpe anba solèy (3:36)
1.10 - Nathalie Joachim - Zetwal (4:14)