isabella

The coast is rough, strewn with driftwood and black basalt pebbles. Gigantic waves heaving and crashing on it, fierce and confident like the rougail dakatine from Ti Carri. Up dans les hauts de Saint-Pierre, le Kerveguen is a strange building, unfinished, industrial, looking like a soviet factory. Inside the venue it feels like the engine room of a cargo, the sound is booming, echoing against...

Early morning, a creole house nestled within the town of St-Gilles. Hidden inside, a small television studio. Walls covered with vinyl records. Heat. For a program called Galigalang we perform « Isabella », then « Black Betty/Sonlouval » with our friends Christine Salem and her percussionnists Harry & David on rouleur drum & piker. All nine musicians are compressed together on a tiny...

Jet-lag. Body clock still tuned into Montreal time. Eyes wide open in the sweltering heat of an unknown room. 5:30am. Alien birdsongs outside, loud and intricate. Lift up the blinds. Palm trees, corrugated metal roofs, haze rising from the forests on the slopes of a rugged mountainside. Dawn is coming, the sky is quickly changing hues. Turn on the A/C and try to get back to sleep, hopelessly...

Oté Koman y lé? Re-uniting with the island and its music. Christine Salem and her musicians Harry and David welcome us to St-Denis; just an hour after landing we’re already set to rehearse with them on stage inside the Palaxa, a venue tucked into an old factory facing the Ocean. Our drummer Eric locks into the maloya rythm, the roulèr bass drum resounds, the kayamb percussion roars, the...

Sunday morning in Montréal, say farewell to the snow-caked sidewalks, leaping over ponds of muddy slush from Mont-Royal to Avenue Laurier. Sunshine melts the icicles away from the high-pitched roofs, but we won’t have time to watch them stab the ground. Hop on a cab to Trudeau Airport and 48 hours later we’re flying over eastern Africa, bound for the Southern hemisphere. From the aft...

Titanic iron-truss bridges across the Saint-Laurent river, trailing a broken ice mantle. Arthur drives the van -packed with amplifiers, a double-bass, a drumkit, five guitars, twenty harmonicas and all the Moriarty family- across slippery highways, down to Sherbrooke. Suburban feel, brickhouses, wide roads, telephone poles, all silent under the falling snow. Tonight we play in a brewery across...

It was a cold sunny day. The slush melted in the curbs. The Cabaret Lion d’Or looked as dark and magnificent as four years ago on our first concert in Montreal. The crowd came at the last minute, filling up the former clandestine bar to the brim. At the balcony a mixed crowd of français and québecois looked on and cheered like crazy. Meanwhile, at the Quai des Brumes at the corner of Mont...

Moriarty on tour: Montréal, Québec, february 21st 2013. Long walks across Mile End, under the snow, frozen noses, wind slaps our faces like a giant whip, wet feet from the sloche, looking for the Maisonnette recording studio, where Lhasa recorded her last album. Learning winter survival in Montréal.

Moriarty on tour: all guitars stacked in the trunk of the tour van, driving through the falling snow, lonesome houses marooned in the white desert, until we finally reach the slushy streets of Mile End and the Plateau; the long straight road from Québec to Montréal, february 21st 2013.

Moriarty on tour: Québec, february 2013. A snowstorm finally shrouds the city, walking back home across the stairs and slopes of quartier St-Jean Baptiste we are chased by the monstrous behemoths scraping the snow from the streets with their mandibles. From the safe heaven of the hotel room we watch Québec city get swallowed and erased by the icy fog.

Moriarty on tour: Québec city, february 2013. In room 702 with Morgan our sound engineer, recording guitar and dobro overdubs for the upcoming project (known as « Before Dylan »). As the basic track of « Mattie Groves » plays in the headphones, and Arthur adds a percussive dobro pattern to it, we watch the skyline of the Basse-Ville, low roofs covered with thick snow, mountains in the horizon, a...

Clear-cut cold morning, -17 degrees celsius, -30 with the wind. Even the ink inside the ballpoint pen freezes and makes it impossible to draw or write outside. This morning we perform an acoustic version of Isabella on radio CHYZ’s Hexagone programme, somewhere underneath the Université de Laval. Then a mad cab races through the slushy streets of Québec to reach radio CKRL for an in-depth...

Woke up to a glaring winter sunlight, reverberating all over the snow-covered harbour, burning our retinas. A lone rusty tanker, the Atlantic Huron, is docked behind the titanic grain silos, its hull and propellers frozen in thick ice. Sometimes a movement occurs, the ice shelf cracks and maelstroms of water gurgle beneath the ship. Arthur captures the clicking of loose sails and cables in the...

Moriarty’s back on the road for the final leg of the Missing Room Tour: sixteen hours in transit from Paris to Montréal to Québec. After a quiet flight on the upstairs deck of a 747 and a long wait under the neon lights of Trudeau airport, we board a tiny Bombardier Dash 8-300 propeller aircraft and fly through ice clouds over the urban electrical grids of Montreal, and after 40 minutes of...

Moriarty recording with the amazing swiss cajun-garage-zydeco band Mama Rosin – Studio Pigalle, Paris 11.02.13.

All the way to Finis Terrae, Penn Ar Bed. As we reach the Pointe de la Torche a hail storm whips us down to the ground like a biblical punishment, Harry and Christine seek shelter behind the german WW2 bunker (twist of fate) and the Moriarties gather around David to protect him (he’s only wearing his Reunion Island summer clothes!). Soon this little apocalypse is relieved by shafts of light...

That club was almost dead a decade ago, and they revived it. Sold-out show tonight!
Moriarty on tour with Christine Salem: La Citrouille, Saint-Brieuc 14.12.12.

A few hundred heated up people under a huge roof looking like a hangar, some of them sitting, some dancing. sweaty good gig. for an encore, played « rambling man » and « jimmy » with Harry, David and Christine’s maloya rythms!
and finished with the great sing-along « mameleo ».
Moriarty on tour with Christine Salem, Espace Ligeria, Montlouis s/Loire (Tours) 13.12.12.

Leaving Paris at dawn, 7am, sun shines on till Bordeaux, a long long drive, we arrive at the Krakatoa, setup the stage and head straight to the beloved Librairie Mollat for a small acoustic gig amidst the books. Then hike back up to Mérignac, and work on some songs with Christine Salem (The Dark Line In The Middle Of Hope) and special guest David Carroll (Buffalo Skinners by Woody Guthrie). The...