Slowly Paradise Eric Chenaux

"A singer and songwriter possessed of angelic sweetness and clarity accompanying himself with largely improvised, visceral guitar textures that seem intent on undermining and obscuring his own songs. It’s the need to communicate tussling with the urge to obfuscate; lucidity versus opacity; form against chaos." – The Wire (cover story, Nov. 2017)

"This is a remarkable record - it is wildly experimental and as comforting as a soft embrace. The way he takes from the singer-songwriter tradition and from the avant-garde somehow enables him to avoid the pitfalls of both, leaving him free to sculpt his own deeply idiosyncratic vision for songwriting. The most interesting art almost always has a sense of duality, and Slowly Paradise is no different; where it radically differs is in the lack of combat between those opposing forces. Chenaux’s love for Sade, for example, in no way contradicts or confuses his love for Derek Bailey. This all-encompassing spirit coalesces on closing track and highlight ‘Wild Moon’, where Chenaux's voice is at its most rapturous, over Driver's restrained but romantic Hammond organ lines, all interwoven with some of the most perplexing guitar workouts on the record. This album is truly his strongest yet, and this closing song is his zenith." – The Quietus

"This voice is perhaps the funnel for this unfurling of thought, where the splay of feeling is consolidated into phrases. His tone is soft, verging on a whisper, as though straddling the boundary between inner thoughts and outward articulation. Sometimes it falls silent, allowing stuttering stylophones or trembling guitars to carry the monologue forth, alternating between the poetry of language and that which spirals away from what the voice can express. I imagine Chenaux to be daydreaming in these moments, as these instrument solos – sometimes chiming like bells, sometimes melting like wax – paint pictures in the air, trying to enact the images that stream through the mind, vivid and beautiful, yet also fluid and unexplainable." – ATTN: Magazine

"Eric Chenaux gets right under the skin and in your head with the intoxicating, jazz-wise chops and strikingly classic-sounding vocals of Slowly Paradise; an instant modern classic if we’ve never heard one!" –