Who is ascendant vierge?
Result of the musical meeting between the singer Mathilde Fernandez and the producer Paul Seul, co-founder of the Casual Gabberz crew, ascendant vierge, without capital letters, was born in 2019. The alliance between a pop with a baroque and lyrical dimension with productions mixed by different currents of hard techno, trance and eurodance stands out with the public and the critics after a handful of self-produced singles.
When the world falls in the pandemic in 2020, their first single Influenceur released the previous summer also becomes viral, accumulating streams and spreading again and again to become a real phenomenon capable of touching the greatest number, well beyond the established chapels in the musical landscape of the moment.
This enthusiasm allows the duo to considerably increase its reach and to embark on tours in front of ever larger crowds. If the group took advantage of this suspended moment of lockdown and its distortion of time to find its public, it was also propelled by the fervor of the reopening which put it in light by passing from the screen to the stage, to radiate in the four corners of Europe and even beyond.
Through its releases, the duo constantly proposes a total experience where sounds, texts and images are at the service of each other, with a high artistic ambition as instantly gratifying as it is conducive to repeated listening, capturing as much as it distills the state of mind and the state of a post-modern world, between lucidity and fragmented dreaminess, distorted but so intensely melodic and poetic, just like their captivating music, their catchy texts and their unique visual identity.
After first singles released in 2019 followed by the EP Vierge released in 2020, the ascendant vierge duo (Mathilde Fernandez & Paul Seul) presents its first album Une Nouvelle Chance in April, the 28th in digital, CD and LP on 12 Stars, label created by the duo for the occasion.
Continuing its alliances between pop with lyrical accents on one hand and club music on the other hand, the duo confirms its singularity in this album whose songs, clips and communication campaign offer a total experience, as sonorous as visual and conceptual. It is the logical continuation of their debut and also a radical change of scale, the launching into orbit of what was at first considered as a musical oddity, now transformed into a pop alchemy of stellar scope and ambition.
The conception of Une Nouvelle Chance began in January 2020 and continued during the lockdown to conclude as the band started their first tour. If the album is only being released today, it's because the band decided to take the time to remain independent, to ensure their artistic integrity and to evolve serenely as the dates passed, fueled by the overwhelming energy of their audience.
The duo has continued its sound research by revisiting different styles from the 90s, transcending the hard techno label that was tempting to stick to them at the beginning, to explore different more "commercial" declinations of electronic music. Trance, eurodance, happy hardcore, EDM or downtempo ballads are all universes that the duo appropriates: each chord progression and each vocalization take the listener by the guts and stay in the head for a long time, and euphoria now prevails over melancholy. The album is mixed by the British Geoff Swan, whose work beautifully showcases the vocal parts.
Mathilde Fernandez's powerful vocals, at the heart of the ascendant vierge sound, sublime the instrumentals. Their poetic texts, between optimistic candor and non-conformist rebellion confer a rare emotion to the songs. Moving away from the music confined to the clubs and getting closer and closer to a total pop with a permanent subtext through a thousand hidden treasures of polysemy, it is difficult not to think of the scope of a post-rave Mylène Farmer while listening, singing and dancing the album.
The comparison is not made lightly when one measures the ambition of a work which is not limited only to the sound. Indeed, the visual aspect is a fundamental dimension of the duo who became known by creative and ambitious music videos. The communication around the release plays with the codes of the representation in the era of all digital, by proposing to the fans an infernal zapping putting Mathilde and Paul in scene in a multitude of contexts and different situations.
Appearing on the album cover as the survivors of a plane crash that could well be a metaphor for our time, ascendant vierge invites us to apprehend their first album as a Une Nouvelle Chance, as literally as allegorically. Their music, their lyrics and their visual and digital sides are experienced as a post-modern and dreamlike version of the black box, where collective and individual memories melt into each other and where the border between the real and the fictitious becomes irremediably blurred. It is life that scrolls before our eyes, in our ears and through our hearts.
