Madeleine & Salomon is the meeting of two artists with well-established musical universes: the vocalist and flutist Clotilde Rullaud and the pianist and composer Alexandre Saada.
Clotilde, whose middle name is Madeleine, is a versatile creator (music, dance, theatre, storytelling) who explores the infinite plastic possibilities of the voice to bring out a new poetic language. Alexandre, whose middle name is Salomon, does the same with his piano. Passionate about improvisation, he takes us where his fingers of a synesthete musician guide him.
Long-time friends, it was in 2014 during a tour of Asia that Clotilde and Alexandre discovered some important points that they have in common: a minimalist sound, the search for the unexpected and that of "accidental synchronicities", a pronounced taste for travel and encounters, the same foundational values, and the desire to participate in the creation of a more open world. They decided to form their duo Madeleine & Salomon.
Their very noticed first album, "A Woman's Journey", was released in 2016. This tribute to committed American singers is enhanced on stage by free improvisations which accompany short, dreamlike films comprised of archival images edited for the occasion.
Six years later, the duo Madeleine & Salomon is back with "Eastern Spring", a superb album in which they revisit the oriental and militant pop of the 1960s-1970s of the Mediterranean region, from Turkey to Morocco via Iran, Lebanon, Israel, and Tunisia.
"Eastern Spring": like a nod to the Arab Spring, but above all an accolade to the hopes of societal change and to the questioning of world youth at the end of the 1960s in the West as well as in the East.
From the end of the sixties to the end of the following decade, the world's youth rose up to demand a new, fairer, freer, more colorful human organization. A social and cultural political movement that rejects war, segregation, narrow morality, and consumerist logic by advocating the strength of imagination, the desire for justice and equity, allied to an acute curiosity for the exploration of the planet, its images, sounds, senses and sensations.
In the West, the kings and queens of pop were inspired by the cultures of the East and in the East, in Asia, the Middle East and all around the Mediterranean, young musicians adopted western electric sounds and western experimental boldness to express their own messages. It is this psychedelic and revolutionary repertoire that Madeleine & Salomon revisit with "Eastern Spring".
Whether romantic, dreamy, or militant, all these songs engage in the sort of social or spiritual interrogation that still matters today, wherever you are in the world.
