DELUXE EDITION OF POLARIS MUSIC PRIZE SHORT-LISTED LP, DANS MA MAIN, AVAILABLE TODAY VIA ARTS & CRAFTS
WATCH AND SHARE “BLIND” HERE
UPCOMING TOUR DATES THROUGHOUT QUEBEC BEGIN MARCH 23
ORDER DELUXE EDITION DANS MA MAIN + EVICTION SESSIONS HERE
Today, Jean-Michel Blais announces the deluxe edition of his Polaris Music Prize short-listed LP, Dans ma main together with his recently released EP, Eviction Sessions. The deluxe edition is available on today from Arts & Crafts and will be available at upcoming performances as Blais continue on an extensive world tour including dates throughout of Quebec. Full tour dates can be found below.
To mark the release, Blais is also sharing the new video for Dans ma main track “blind”. Directed by Mauriès Matos the video is “the story about Anna the overachiever, who uses herself as a subject during experimental research as a young acclaimed yet controversial plant neurobiologist,” says Matos. “During the process of using herself in her study, she makes an incredible discovery of a type of rhizome plant which allows one to reach their own consciousness. One night, on the eve of preparations to reveal this great announcement, she experiences the first encounter with Self.
‘I found myself recognizing the inherent beauty of nature as time erases all previous conditioning. The path isn’t linear like the world isn’t flat, its round and it spirals round and round, moving deeper and inward. And now, I feel lost.’ - Anna
In a greater sense, the video for Blind is also about Belief as a technology that creates change. That magic isn’t an effect. It’s a way to create change through processes that you can’t entirely understand. There are aspects of human reality we can’t measure, supernatural things that happen. Magic means you can give yourself an opportunity to stop analyzing things. Even for us – how are we going to figure out what’s next? How are we going to bend all the information at our disposal into a new truth?”
WATCH AND SHARE “BLIND” HERE
Accompanying Blais celebrated LP, Dans ma main, in the deluxe edition is the Eviction Sessions, a 5 song EP recorded in his beloved apartment during an intimate farewell performance before being evicted.
“In the spring of 2018, I was asked to leave the beloved apartment where lived for 7 years, and where I recorded my first album, Il,” explains Blais. “Before signing with Arts & Crafts, I would host one show a year in the intimacy of my bedroom. Eviction Sessions is a recording of my final pop-up concert in that apartment, and my way to say goodbye to that room, “he continues. “Friends and family, side by side on the floor, on my bed, sharing the silence of their breathing, I wanted to record a live album in a unique way that would capture the presence of them being.”
The result is eviction sessions, recorded live to accompany Blais’ recent full length, Dans ma main. The EP features new piano-only recordings the vocal and electronic-heavy album tracks, “blind”, “igloo” and “chanson”, as well as two new songs, “sans titre (andante)” and “hutchinson (improvisation)”.
WATCH A LIVE PERFORMANCE OF “SANS TITRE (ANDANTE)”
PHOTO CREDIT : Drowster // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
MORE ABOUT DANS MA MAIN
Dans ma main, the sophomore release by pianist and composer Jean-Michel Blais, is an expansive album of post-classical piano with strands of electronic detail. Blending his conservatory skill and precise pop sensibility with synthetic accompaniment, Blais creates unique environments where the piano’s intimacy can be subtly disrupted at any time.
Largely composed in one week of open exploration, Blais comes closer to the improvisational source of his writing, painting impressionistic stories within the fluid, indefinite outlines of dreams. Dans ma main rolls like clouds of nostalgic fog blown away on a clear wind, at once recalling and signifying the end of Il, his critically acclaimed 2016 debut album.
By contrast, Il was written and recorded by Blais over two years, culled from rolls of accumulated experimentation into an enchanting, unignorable arrival. Il unearthed an unknown musical imagination, with overwhelmingly intimate compositions cloaked in the romantic din of Montreal city noise. The debut album would go on to amass 50 million streams worldwide, reaching #1 on Canadian Classical Albums chart, and transforming audiences globally.
On Dans ma main, tempted by a tangent first explored on Cascades, his 2017 collaborative EP with Grammy-nominated electronic producer CFCF – born from a featured performance at 2016’s Red Bull Music Academy – Blais steps out with an artistic statement that both reaffirms and refutes his post-classical stature. The disparate universes within Dans ma main are so seamlessly entwined that they appear borderless.
Dans ma main weaves together expressive piano with austere synths in a double-helix of acoustic and electronic arpeggiation, tethering techno, industrial, ambient, and new age music to Blais’ solo piano essence.
The first single, “roses”, is a binary journey, softly oscillating between despair and hope. Oblique turns meet familiar resolve, as warm chords reference Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”, and Eric Carmen / Celine Dion’s “All By Myself”, in sharp counterpoint to Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 2 – an unexpected, but intentional cross-hatching of high-and low-art. Its emotional arc – optimistic and funereal – closes soundly with the glint of cinematic strings.
LISTEN AND SHARE “ROSES” HERE
The pulsating and elastic “blind” captures the grace with which Blais traces this genre dance. “Built as a subtle transition from acoustic to electronic, the piece blends styles, deconstructs categories, pushes back boundaries alongside a spectrum reflecting our human potential to self-transcendence,” Blais describes. “Might we be blind at night, at least we aren’t deaf.”
LISTEN AND SHARE “BLIND” HERE
Dans ma main explores an everyday life awash in spirituality, stemming from Blais’ interplay with music as therapy. Compelled by the cathartic air that audiences exude in his pin-drop performances, Blais considers how music has served as a tool of wellness in his own life. From his prior career in special education, to the role classical and ambient music played soothing the Tourettic symptoms he experienced as a child, Jean-Michel’s new compositions subconsciously call upon these periods of his life, reimagining a serenity he had only experienced seated at the piano.
Decidedly not limited to the keys as his compositional palette, Blais’ music is imbued with an emotional depth that belies its wordlessness. His playing and composition are poetic in themselves, with an inspired understanding of the inherent lyricism in instrumental music.
Borrowing imagery from the words of singer-songwriter Safia Nolin on “igloo”, Blais’ interprets the lonely nights where, “wandering like an amnesic ghost,” one can find oneself within its own shadowy reflections, a nostalgic incursion into a person’s vintage recollections.
LISTEN AND SHARE “IGLOO” HERE
Yet perhaps in the album’s most unexpected turn, on closer “chanson”, Blais reveals his own hidden falsetto, trilling like adjacent keys in a nearly wordless lilt. Ironically, the only discernible meaning he sings: “I speak.” Blais presents the human voice as another instrument, resting vague in its definition, so emphasizing the listener’s active role in projecting and interpreting itself. As Blais says, “What one hears becomes more relevant and telling than what is said.”
More than Blais’ mastery of composition x improvisation, greater than his ability to touch and confront emotion – including the pain of even death (“roses” and “a heartbeat away”) – is his ability to challenge listeners. The title track, “dans ma main”, and by extension the album as a whole, is about Blais’ conscious decision to pursue the unknowns of a musical path.
LISTEN AND SHARE “DANS MA MAIN” HERE
Growing up in rural Quebec, Blais began writing original compositions by age 11, and by 17 was invited to the Trois-Rivières Music Conservatory. However, the constraints of formal training drew Blais off this musical course, putting aside his piano until years later, settling in Montreal, he rediscovered his love.
The result, as Blais’ body of work unfurls, is the creation of a new musical forum where freshly sounded notes bounce back instantly with the magic and wisdom of shared space. Dans ma main captures but one moment of this infinite lineage, but with it comes the reminder of all the energy we hold in our own hands, in this moment. As Blais says:
“Like pieces of an unclear puzzle, a melting mirror, hope lays right there, into our singular hands, with which we love, we fail, we pray, we steal, we give, we try, we pay, we pluck, we muff, we scratch, we touch, we play, we hold each other’s hands.”
TOUR DATES
Feb 23: Musikcafeen - Copenhagen, DK
Feb 25: Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum, DE
Feb 27: Kuz Kulturzentrum - Mainz, DE
Feb 28: Kulturzentrum Dieselstrasse - Esslingen, DE
Mar 1: Heppel & Ettlich - Munich, DE
Mar 2: Purcell Room - London, UK
Mar 3: Zonnehuis - Amsterdam, NL
Mar 6: Théâtre le Piaf - Bernay, FR
Mar 11: John Dee - Oslo, NOR
Mar 23: Theatre Lac-Brome - Lac-Brome, CA
Mar 24: Salle méchatigan - Sainte-Marie, CA
Mar 29: Centre Culturel Henri Lemieux - Montreal, CA
Mar 30: Cabaret Espace Scène - Rimouski, CA
Apr 1: Centre des Arts de baie-comeau - Baie-Comeau, CA
Apr 2: Salle Jean-Marc Dion - Sept-Iles, CA
Apr 4: Studio Hydro-Québec du Quai des Arts - Carleton-sur-mer, CA
Apr 5: Central United Church - Moncton, CA
Apr 6: St. Matthew's United Church - Halifax, CA
Apr 10: L`étoile Banque Nationale - Brossard, CA
Apr 11: Cabaret BMO Sainte-Thérèse - Sainte-Thérèse, CA
Apr 13: St-george Church - Granby, CA
Apr 26: Le Centre d'Art la Petite église - Saint-Eustache, CA
May 2: Monument National - Montreal, CA