David-Guillou, Angèle - En Mouvement (CD) |

London-based French composer Angèle David-Guillou makes audacious music that explores the interaction between rhythm and melody, structure and emotion, permanence and change. Her work is one of incessant dialogue between these elements, creating hypnotic compositions whose mutable internal architecture and shifting melodic accentuations immediately draw the listener in. It’s a compositional process that is central to the eight compelling essays on the aptly titled’ En Mouvement,’ David-Guillou’s new album, the second under her given name, but it’s an approach that was present even in her earlier singer-songwriting work as Klima, and with cult electronic art-rock band Piano Magic. Her signature writing style is characterised by asymmetric bar lengths, irregular verse constructions and zoetrope-like arrangements – an approach to music as implicitly indebted to the canon of innovative rock and pop, Philip Glass’s ‘Music With Changing Parts’ or early European Baroque music. Born and raised in Tours in the Loire Valley, David-Guillou was classically educated in piano, singing, harmony and musical theory. She became obsessed with the work of German composer Carl Orff at a young age, and later enticed by the experimentation of Sonic Youth, taught herself guitar and joined her first rock band at 15. Simultaneously, she developed a longstanding interest in the academic study of the social history of music, and worked on her PhD at the Sorbonne. From 2002 she began collaborating with the aforementioned London-based avant-rock group Piano Magic, singing and playing guitar, synths and other keyboards, co-writing a good deal of the band’s material and touring all over the world. In 2006 she moved to London and recorded her debut solo album, under the Klima moniker. Released the following year on West London’s Peacefrog imprint (home to José González, Little Dragon et al), the album was a critical success. She was soon at work on a second Klima album, ‘Serenades and Serinettes,’