Walloon avant-garde musician Melanie de Biasio (b. 1978) likes to be inspired by her surroundings. In the case of the 2016 EP
Blackened Cities, these were post-industrial cities such as Manchester, Bilbao and - most notably - her hometown of Charleroi, a typical bleak image of which graced the cover. After the relatively uptempo
Lilies a year later, in 2021 De Biasio was asked by the multidisciplinary
… arts festival Europalia to work on the theme of trains and tracks. She then decided to reconstruct the migration route that brought her grandparents from Italy to Belgium. Armed only with an old camera and some recording material, De Biasio settled in the mountain village of Lettomanoppello. There she laid the foundation for Il Viaggio; a sparse, fraught and often overwhelming double album, which, with its tales of migration - invariably sung in her typical whispered singing style - is all 2023. Trains and tracks - the original theme - return in the haunting opener Lay Your Ear To The Ground and the haunting Chiesa, which consists of little more than distant wheels hurtling forward on iron rails. (RME)more
