[Longueur d’Ondes] n°93 – Shadows & Lights

As published in Longueur d’Ondes

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With his previous band Your Favorite Enemies, Alex Henry Foster had known great success but the media pressure related to it has left him drained. It was time to get on new adventures, in this case, a solo career. Parting with his Montreal ways, a scene in which he had soaked throughout his teenage years, he left for Tangier, where he was initially supposed to stay for a few months. He would finally spend two years there. Tangier, celebrated by the poets from the Beat Generation, seemed like the perfect setting for a sensitive artist like him: “I don’t have any roots there, nor any kind of phantasmagoria related to this city. The loss of my father affected me deeply. Four days after his passing, I played at a festival in Taiwan with YFE in front of 90,000 people. I felt far from everything. I felt I needed to lose myself somewhere, far from home. I then went to Tangier, this city made of paradoxes; not totally European, not totally Africain, and I wrote my album Windows in the Sky there, in total abandonment, freeing myself of numerous things while finding back the essence of creation. Over there, I also had the possibility to reconnect with artists from the Beat Generation.” Therefore, it’s not surprising to hear the voice of Ginsberg declaiming this great poem that reflects the innocence that is “The weight of the world is love” on “Shadows of Our Evening Tides”, one of the main tracks on the album. Alex undoubtedly finds himself amongst the artists who, following the example of poets and musicians he particularly likes such as Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, or Swans, decompartmentalize genres and styles: “Art is a vector for emotions. I feel the need to immerse myself in it 100%.”

Pierre-Arnaud Jonard

October 2, 2020