Elizabeth Vogler

The celebration is somewhere inside the drone. On Le Carnaval Perdu, fragments of voices and festivities surface through sustained tones and processed sound, suggesting a gathering that might be taking place just beyond hearing - or surviving only in memory. Elizabeth Vogler builds this elusive world from influences that belong to their own musical history: a love of pop and bal folk, training in electroacoustic composition and Bulgarian polyphonic singing. Following albums released in 2024 and 2025 on Bientôt Veuves and Billo, this new full-length brings those strands into their boldest recorded configuration yet. Co-produced by Éditentités, Illogique Musique and La République des Granges, it approaches folklore as something lived, transformed and continually invented.

At the centre is a voice whose power comes as much from physical resonance as from melodic expression. Vogler explores multiple techniques and languages of their own invention, allowing vocal sound to carry meaning beyond the immediately intelligible. Their regular companion is the shruti box, an Indian drone instrument related to the harmonium, whose sustained notes establish a ground beneath the shifting arrangements. Recorded and processed layers gradually emerge around it. Sometimes the voice itself enters that machinery, becoming material to stretch, transform and weave through the electroacoustic fabric. The distinction between singer and instrument begins to loosen: breath becomes texture, a drone acquires bodily presence, and the music moves between intimate utterance and a more enveloping vibration.

Carnival gives these transformations a vivid emotional setting. Bursts of celebration interrupt the tangle of sounds, but the title keeps disappearance close at hand. Vogler’s own cover illustration extends that ambiguity, depicting enigmatic figures in costumes drawn from traditional festivities, apparently mourning a carnival that has vanished. The connection to popular culture is neither decorative nor confined to imagery. Some lyrics are written in Béarnais, the variety of Occitan spoken in their home region, placing inherited language beside invented speech. That encounter gives the album its particular tension: recognisable cultural traces remain present, yet nothing is required to stay intact. Vogler’s broader practice likewise treats remembered sounds as material for metamorphosis, leaving room for vocal and electronic improvisation rather than a fixed form.

Vogler composed the music and wrote the texts, with recording at La Grange Caval and mixing by Manuel Duval, mastering by Justin Valette, and graphic design by Luce Roux. Those credits frame a work in which sound, language and visual imagination share the same terrain. Le Carnaval Perdu does not reconstruct a lost communal ritual so much as discover what its echoes can still set in motion. Its personal folklore holds exuberance and mourning together, inviting the listener into the dance without pretending that everything the dance once meant can be recovered.