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The debut album. People usually say a musician spends his whole life recording his first album. It's an autobiographical ode to the coming of age. It is comprised of songs written during his formative years, and it reflects the many musical and literary influences and heroes. It is through this process that Parisian musician Charles Braud bares it all - sincerely, naively, and without filters. Using the moniker, Her Magic Wand, Braud will officially drop on February 19th his aptly-named debut album, Everything at Once. After 10 months of recording in his home studio in Paris, audio alch ...read more
The debut album. People usually say a musician spends his whole life recording his first album. It's an autobiographical ode to the coming of age. It is comprised of songs written during his formative years, and it reflects the many musical and literary influences and heroes. It is through this process that Parisian musician Charles Braud bares it all - sincerely, naively, and without filters. Using the moniker, Her Magic Wand, Braud will officially drop on February 19th his aptly-named debut album, Everything at Once. After 10 months of recording in his home studio in Paris, audio alchemist Stephane 'Alf' Briat, who has mixed for bands like Phoenix and Air, stepped in to work with Braud on the mixing of Everything at Once. Next, the highly regarded mastering engineer, Chab, who has mastered albums for Daft Punk and Etienne Daho, came on to lend his talents to mastering Braud's debut.
The name of the album is inspired by a scene in the Craig Gillespie film, “Lars and the Real Girl,” wherein the main character faces loss and love in a rollercoaster of life experiences while an old woman puts this contradiction perfectly into words by saying: "This is how life is, Lars. Everything at once." The songs touch on themes such as alienation (‘Draw a Line’); synesthesia – the neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense (e.g. sight) produces experiences in a different sense, (e.g. sound) (‘Everything at Once’); the passing of time and the fading of memories (‘Blank Memory Track’), or even death as personified by a very young Robert Redford in The Twilight Zone episode from 1961 called “Nothing in the Dark” (‘Harold Beldon’). But despite those heavy themes, the tone of the album is infused with optimism, hope, and feel-good melancholy.
Her Magic Wand draws inspiration from a mix of dream pop and electronica, a collision of genres that can be found in Lali Puna's cover of Slowdive's shoegaze anthem ‘40 Days,’ where the German outfit traded Slowdive's guitars full of reverb for digital signal processing effects. The song had a big impact on Braud, who took the opposite route, shifting from computer music (his "magic wand") back to fuzzy guitars and analog synths. He added to his palette familiar sounds like the pulse of the drum machine used by the Smashing Pumpkins on ‘1979,’ or like the orchestral strings found on the sound module used by The Flaming Lips on their classic album, The Soft Bulletin. He even invited Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), one of his heroes, to sing and play on a remix featured on Blossom EP, Her Magic Wand's first release out in September 2015.
Those personal tributes are a way to acknowledge Braud's influences but also to take distance, because Her Magic Wand's music is in no way nostalgic. It's sincere and dreamy pop music, homecrafted but ambitious - the music Braud wanted to listen to; and perhaps the music you will want to listen to. « hide |
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