As part of the 35th edition of the Inrocks Festival, the Bourse de Commerce is hosting a concert by New York singer and multi-instrumentalist L’Rain. She is presenting her fascinating, most recent album I Killed Your Dog. The evening begins with a delicate live set by the Los Angeles experimental jazz duo Salenta + Topu, playing piano and cello.
Programme
8:00 p.m.: Salenta + Topu
8:30 p.m.: L’Rain
Taja Cheek, alias L’Rain, burst onto New York’s experimental music scene with the release of her first album in 2017. A multi-instrumentalist, composer, and singer, her visceral and spiritual songs are rooted in R&B, jazz, noise, and pop. Her third album I Killed Your Dog (released in October 2023 by Mexican Summer) reprises the themes of grief and identity that fed into her previous works to explore the wounds inflicted on loved ones. The sixteen tracks on this album – ranging from songs to interludes, assembled like scraps of randomly discovered sounds – form a labyrinthine sound collage between garage rock, psych-folk, and dance-pop.
Salenta De Badisdenne and Topu Lyo met in 2018 at a friend's place in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. They decided to play together and began meeting on a weekly basis for improv sessions. In 2020, at the beginning of the lockdown, Topu sent Salenta files of their recordings, a nostalgic, contemplative music for cello and piano. They made few changes to this long-term project, which they released as the album Moon Set, Moon Rise in 2023 on Futura Resistenza. It features 17 solitary tracks that are at times slow and at others ardent, the elusive notes pirouetting ecstatically in fits and starts.
Since 1988, the Inrocks Festival has featured the best of contemporary music, from emerging talents to legends of the indy music scene, at performances held at Paris’ most famous venues. Past acts have included Happy Mondays, Suuns, Spiritualized, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Suede, Warpaint, Pulp, Chilly Gonzales, and Clara Luciani. In 2023, the Bourse de Commerce and the Inrocks Festival hosted a concert by post-punk electronic legend Martin Rev of the London lo-fi band bar italia.
