PROFILES

“I can say with confidence that I’ve always loved words,” laughs the 26-year-old singer from Nice, whose first album you can now download on music-streaming platforms. Oriane, a little local nugget on the new French chanson scene, excels at writing songs about the banal things that give life its intimate and singular taste. Her own little world? “I grew up with, I was even moulded by French chanson. Then I got into slam at La Cave Romagnan, a typically Nice place, surprising and popular in the best sense of the word. Slam isn’t a musical genre, it’s a type of poetry competition where everyone comes to recite their three-minute text and then the audience votes.” It’s not surprising that Oriane is so involved in introducing this discipline to students in Nice at the Théâtre de l’Impasse, in association with Oryga Music. That’s how she met the two Nice rappers who feature on her album L’Ornithorynque (Platypus). “I love rap, and there’s a really interesting mix in the South of France! But it has become a bit of a mishmash as a musical genre. It was socially conscious rap in the 90s, and now there are as many bling-bling as there are introspective rappers,” continues Oriane, who sings of longing for burned memories with YTL, and the love of two battered characters with Maskit. And what makes you want to listen is precisely this assumed fragility. The way she humorously proclaims that she’s a platypus: “Some friends used to call me Orni, and so I found the connection with this animal that seems to have picked up a duck’s bill and a beaver’s tail amusing.” This singer-songwriter’s collaborations aren’t just musical, they’re about affinity. As with Philippe Balatier from the group No Jazz, who composed all the music for this opus, and video director Gaëlle Simon, who sensitively produced two video clips from the album.

By Tanja Stojanov – Photo Gaëlle Simon