Subtitles For The Silent Versions

Half Asleep’s new album invokes Muslim Spain, ageless folklore, and Polanski soundtracks. One of our most beautiful releases to date.

Subtitles for the Silent Versions is a record filled with shocks. The first one is entitled “How quiet” and contains two of young Belgian Valérie Leclercq aka Half Asleep’s new obsessions – sweet arpeggios on an old classical guitar offered by her father (the piano used on the album was a family gift too), and intertwined voices, solemn though never self-conscious.

Multiple backing vocals are the album's thread. In some songs, they evoke Krzysztof Komeda’s scores for Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby), as the finale in “The grass divides as with a comb”. In some others, as “Personnalité H”, the backing vocals sound like the timeless harmonic arrangement that were heard in ancient religious chants. In the amazing song “For God’s sake, let them go”, they can remind you of the Yiddish influences in Why?’s first record, when Yoni Wolf started experimenting on a 4-track in the family synagogue.

Let’s make it clear: when Valérie recorded the album in her flat in Brussels (helped by a few friends who played brass and woodwinds), she’d never heard of any of these references.

Half Asleep’s previous record was the dignified and profound (We are now) Seated in Profile (2005). She was then compared to other solo female singers – Patty Waters, Lisa Germano, and the queen, Nina Simone. With Subtitles for the Silent Versions, Half Asleep has invented a new musical territory. “The fifth stage of sleep”, for example, is a displaced song. Geographically, historically, artistically, hearing these thirteen shocks transports you to a blank, unexplored ground, actually located in your innermost thoughts.

All of us at We are Unique! Records knew very soon that our 27th release would be a great one; but each of us experienced Subtitles for the silent versions as a intensely personal and private journey. So what you’ll be hearing belongs to you only, for sure. Before leaving Brussels to study history in Yale, Valérie Leclerc made an awakening record. A album of one’s own.

Frédéric Ameel and Valérie’s production and Gilles Deles and Frédéric Alstadt’s mastering are as well-balanced and humble as the record’s arrangement. Subtitles for the silent versions clearly isn’t a contemporary album (the same could be said about Beth Gibbons’ Out of Season). This is why we love it.
(Mickaël Mottet)