elie zoé Shifting Forms
elie zoé release their fourth album via their home from home, Humus Records. Its title, “shifting forms”, is the first sign that we are in the presence of a singularly courageous artist wholeheartedly embracing a radical change of their circumstances.
Now referring to their previous persona “Emilie Zoé” – awarded the Swiss Music Prize in 2020 and, for “Hello Future Me”, the Indiesuisse award for “album of the year 2022” – as “a project”, it seems best to let the artist themselves (or at least their lengthy press release) do the explaining: “With shifting forms, elie zoé releases their fourth album, following in the line of the minimally instrumented pop and rock aesthetics of their previous works. It is the first under their real name, the one they chose, the first carried by their reclaimed voice. This collection of nine songs, built on the branches of a fifteen-year body of work, is the new treehouse from where the artist invites us to observe an unfamiliar landscape: one of metamorphosis, of alignment, of another way of inhabiting the world”.
Anyone familiar with the previous three albums will be amazed by shifting forms. Towards the end of 2023, changes in their body reached their voice, making it drop dramatically. In remarkably quick time, elie zoé has learned not just to talk, but also to sing with this “reclaimed” voice. To help the process, they and producer/musician/“near-brother” Louis Jucker built a new recording studio using salvaged materials in the Humus premises in La Chaux-de Fonds. shifting forms was recorded with the help of Louis Jucker (production, keys, synths, etc), Luc Hess (drums) and Sara Oswald (cello).
