Tuesday, 30 April 2024


Kristen Noguès - An evor (1990)

So she shared a professor with Alan Stivell, he becomes a world music star, she dwindles into obscurity, and you ask what’s wrong with the world - except that ship has sailed, throughout the entirety of human history in fact, and furthermore continues to roam every body of water and bid adieu to every port, so, perhaps more to the point, you might ask instead what was right with her. 
All suggests Kristen Noguès did pretty much the best she had to do on this earth, with the never enough time allotted to those who do good things with it: offer the most beautiful music she could render from the means of expression specific to her cultural milieu, making them an extension of her personal sensibility, in perfect respect of both community and self, without ever making a spectacle of either; and her legacy, for all its subtle but distinctly heterodox plays on the musical tradition of the Breton harp, from all I’ve heard from her, is pretty faultless. So I guess quiet oblivion really was what she had coming to her all along: considering how the music business works, that's just asking to be ignored. Good for her; shame on us.