emmanuelle parrenin @ the guardian (uk)

Cult musician Emmanuelle Parrenin: 'I like to dive into the void and invent something'

Philip Bloomfield

The singer and instrumentalist caused a riot at a Clash gig, cured herself of deafness, and, decades on from her debut LP, is an icon to young French producers. ‘I love to discover,’ she explains

“In terms of my career, I only made bad choices.” Emmanuelle Parrenin is discussing the importance of intuition. “But in terms of what I like, I made good choices.”

Intuition has taken Parrenin, now at an undefined point in her 70s, to some remarkable places: from stages with the Clash to deserts in Morocco, and in and out of deafness. Often narrowly described as a folk musician for her role in the revival of French traditional music in 1970s, her career has been an exercise in pushing boundaries – and, indeed, ignoring them – while becoming one of her country’s most enduring cult musicians.

Born into an elite musical family, she still had to find her own way through music. She began playing the guitar aged 15, and was soon kicked out of her religious boarding school for “writing songs about the nuns”. A couple of years later, in the mid-60s, surrounded by beatniks in Paris’s Latin Quarter, she got her first glimpse of a hurdy-gurdy at a concert. “The sound went straight to my stomach,” she remembers. “It touched me deeply, it shook my insides. I said: I want to play that.”

A medieval stringed instrument resembling a squat violin with a hand-crank, the hurdy-gurdy is capable of everything from reedy tones to throaty drones, and is difficult to master. “You want to do one thing and something else comes out, so you have to play with what you get,” Parrenin says. Yet her instrument’s mercurial character matches her own. “It’s like in life: I like to dive into the void and have to invent something.”

Maison Rose, her debut LP, is a swan dive into the unknown. She’d spent the last years of the 60s crisscrossing France and Quebec, tape recorder in hand, seeking to preserve traditional music. By the mid-70s, she was a renowned traditional musician in her own right, touring and recording as part of multiple ensembles.

The 1977 record is at once the culmination of, and the decisive break with, those years. Fed up with singing traditional lyrics about “women suffering”, she looked for a new direction, and working solely with engineer Bruno Menny – Maison Rose’s only outside songwriting contribution is Plume Blanche, Plume Noire by Jean-Claude Vannier, who famously wrote for Serge Gainsbourg – she crafted a psychedelic, ethereal folk masterpiece that still feels suspended outside time.

It seemed as if Parrenin was on the cusp of real fame. Yet folk and traditional music in France had become “cliquey, cloistered”; following her intuition, she drifted into different circles. In 1981, she opened for the Clash at le Zénith in Paris, with an experimental group she’d formed with Didier Malherbe of prog rockers Gong. Although she “deeply admired” the spirit of punk, she couldn’t have been “further from the aesthetic”, as she found out that night. Her group nearly started a riot. “People started hitting each other, blood everywhere.” They abandoned their planned performance and improvised: “That’s how we saved our skins!”

Emmanuelle Parrenin.

Emmanuelle Parrenin. Photograph: Philippe Taka

There’s no document of the concert, but in 2017 French label Souffle Continu released Pérélandra, a set of previously unheard recordings from this era. Parrenin had begun to compose for dance – “it let me use more space, more tone” – and the pieces are dream-like, spacious and spiritual. She wrote music for American choreographer Carolyn Carlson, and even joined her troupe as a dancer.

But in 1993, she was left almost entirely deaf after a “very violent assault”, which she prefers not to discuss. Doctors told her she would probably never hear again. During her recovery, a friend offered her the use of an Alpine chalet in the Haute-Savoie region near Switzerland. “No water, no electricity, and I went there with my instruments.” She played the harp and sang to herself every day, and little by little, her hearing returned, which she attributes to the effects of resonance. Recovered, she “came down from my mountain” and spent the next 10 years working throughout the region as a musical therapist. She studied in Paris (“a waste of time – I learned everything in the field”) and devised a treatment based on her own experiences, maïeuphonie, which she still practises today.

In her absence, Maison Rose acquired cult status, much to her bemusement: “For me, it was forgotten, it was another era.” She returned to Paris around 2001 to find that a new generation of mostly electronic musicians had become enamoured of her music. Among them was Étienne Jaumet of synth duo Zombie Zombie, who would become a close friend and frequent collaborator. “You don’t feel the age difference at all with Emmanuelle,” he tells me. “There’s something very ageless about her way of being, her way of approaching things.”

“I love to discover,” she says, “and I love when people show me things.” Her passion for collaboration has played a major part in her return to music. In 2011 she teamed up with singer/songwriter Flóp and Jaumet to record Maison Cube, her first record since Maison Rose, and in 2013 she joined outsider musician Jandek – “a very simple, nice man” – in concert in Paris, singing as part of an improvised performance.

Her new record, Jours de Grève (Strike Days), was recorded during the French general strikes of 2019 and 2020 with Detlef Weinreich, AKA producer Tolouse Low Trax. Jaumet’s friend Gilb’R, who runs the label Versatile, paired the two up. “It’s the freedom she has in her approach that makes it work,” Gilb’R says, “and also this certain freshness she has.”

Marrying Weinreich’s brooding, artful dubs with Parrenin’s voice and the hum of the hurdy-gurdy, the album is brighter and lighter than expected. Weinreich reveals that she paid him the ultimate compliment on hearing the final mix: “She said she’d never heard anything like this before.” He neatly defines his own philosophy as “everything is danceable” and that seeped into the collaboration, to the delight of both parties. “That’s something I can’t necessarily do with my music,” adds Parrenin, “and I love that.”

Parrenin herself is releasing another record of her own compositions in March (on fledgling Parisian label Johnkôôl) recorded on the fifth floor of an apartment building with just a microphone. “Not the best one … and yet it sounds good!” she tells me, with all the excitement of an artist about to release her first album.

She has never stopped following her prized intuition, she says, “even when I fall on my face”. She found herself in the Moroccan desert as the Covid-19 quarantines hit, the festival she was supposed to play cancelled. She ended up spending a month stranded in a desert camp. “I was the only European, I didn’t speak Arabic, there was nothing.” In her inimitable manner, being caught in a sandstorm becomes terrifying, memorable and a little funny: “I became a sand woman! I went deaf again because of sand in my ears.”

Her friends and family are at times despairing, but unsurprised. “Emmanuelle, you could write a book about her,” sighs Jaumet. “Things are always happening to her – she’s in a permanent state of adventure.”

Jours de Grève is out now on Versatile.