Music
The best kept secret in music
Press
This band has no press
Discography
Still working on that hot first release.
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
Turning the usual order of things on its head, Bussy only became a band after their first album was written. That may seem strange but when you consider that the lyrics were started over 150 years before the album was even conceived, it begins to make sense.
Bussy’s debut album, ‘Poe Session’, was inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. When the concept came to Paris-based band founder Xavier Bussy he immersed himself in Poe’s stories and poems chose the texts he felt could best be augmented by music and set about creating the skeletons of songs around them.
‘Poe Session’ was released in October 2002 and the band toured around France and other European countries, including dates as diverse as shows in bookshops and an appearance at the Truck festival (Oxford, UK) in summer 2003.
Q magazine opined that Bussy's Poe project was better than Lou Reed's and said: "While muted piano, drifting strings and vocals that often veer towards the deadpan place this firmly in Nick Cave territory - or perhaps that of a more warped Tindersticks - the sinuous guitar lines and knowing use of samples ensure they define a sonic space of their own", and (well-established and respected Cambridge fanzine) Repeat said: “a brave and slightly strange idea, but it works beautifully. The music evokes Waits and Cave with a strikingly European slant, conjuring suave, smokey cafe cool from a more elegant century but with a gypsy edge that adds the element of danger necessary to make it Poe-etic”.
Today, Bussy’s second album is almost complete, featuring words by Boris Bergman, Marcel Kanche and Emily Dickinson. Bussy’s expansive yet sensitiveis milieu is perfectly suited to her bleak terrain: the imagery of a shipwrecked soul marooned from human contact runs through the record in both the sound and the lyrics. As Xavier explains, “I’m very attracted to the musicality of the lyrics, this is the main reason. But it makes sense following the first LP since Poe very much turns to the loss of the other half. Solitude was a theme we had already worked on so it was a natural progression – the same frames of reference, the same atmosphere.”
Despite this apparent preoccupation with darker themes, the Bussy live experience is very different: the songs may remain the same, but the atmosphere - if not quite one of unfettered joy - is of a quiet exultation, the result of the pleasure derived from such intellectual and artistic endeavour for band and audience alike.
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