KEXP at Trans Musicales: Fishbach

This week, we continue sharing our discoveries from the Trans Musicales festival in Rennes, France, where last December we captured twelve exclusive sessions. We’re sharing with you one unique session each Friday, and you can watch all the previously released ones here. This week, we present a stripped down session with a young Parisian singer-songwriter who records under her surname, Fishbach, in the rotunda of the Rennes Opera House.

DJ Morgan says of our experience:

The opera house, as you can imagine, has great acoustics and I was wondering if any of the groups would take advantage of them by performing an acoustic set. Enter Fishbach (a.k.a. Flora Fishbach). This 25-year old chanteuse from Northern France has been working like crazy since the age of 18 playing music. Over the last year, she and two other musicians, one of them being her bass player, Michelle, went on a tour of small clubs playing stripped down shows, one of which included a tiny room here in Rennes, where Trans Musicales festival booker, Jean-Louis Broussard, happened to be in attendance. Fast forward a year and Fishbach is doing a residency leading up to and during Trans Musicales. I believe she said they had played something like 5 or 6 shows in the past week. Usually with a full electric band, Fishbach this time sat on the steps of the rotunda and played a quiet, stripped down set for us that was just lovely. Flora sang and played guitar, while the rest of her band provided vocal harmonies. She has a beautiful voice and writes very catchy hooks that we were all singing the rest of the day. After the performance, Michelle was telling me the story of the small club show they played when Jean-Louis Broussard discovered them. She said the room was tiny and packed with people. There was no PA system, just two speakers on a table which had a beer sitting on one of the monitors. People swayed forward and the speaker fell, causing the beer to go flying and dumped over a lady’s head who quickly raised both arms and excitedly yelled “WOOOO!”. Afterword, Jean-Louis asked them to come to a party with him, mentioning he was friends with Cyprus Hill. I thought, oh man, this is going to be a good story... but then Michelle got called away and had to leave. I hope to hear the rest of that story some day! What kind of shenanigans can you get up to with Cyrus Hill?

Though no such shenanigans occurred during Fishbach's set at the Rennes Opera House, you'd be insane in the brain not to watch her raw, emotive performance right now. After that, check out her Facebook page for more music and more info, and be sure to pick up Fishbach's recently released full-length debut, A Ta Merci.

Watch more sessions recorded by KEXP at Trans Musicales here.