Conjurer sa tristesse avec des mélodies réconfortantes, soulignées de beats digitaux et de guitare acoustique, inventer de nouvelles gammes d’arcs-en-ciel émotifs, faire danser avec, parfois au coin de l’œil, une larme imperceptible. Et cette voix qui nous enveloppe aussitôt, dont on n’arrive plus à se décrocher… Bienvenue dans le monde de David Numwami.

Lorsqu’il avait cinq ans, sa mère l’inscrit à un cours de solfège, ayant entendu dire que la musique guérissait les âmes blessées... En effet, dès sa naissance, en mars 1994, David est plongé dans le chaos génocidaire du Rwanda. Avec sa mère et ses grandes sœurs, ils trouveront un nouveau foyer en Belgique, à Louvain-La-Neuve, drôle de ville nouvelle et universitaire. C’est là que David apprendra la guitare au même âge où l’on apprend à lire. Pendant dix ans, il ne cessera d’en explorer les arpèges et les improvisations. À l’adolescence, il officie dans un groupe dont trois des membres le suivront dans son projet Le Colisée, fondé au début des années 2010.

Une fois majeur, et en parallèle de ses études de philosophie, David orchestre la pop du Colisée, apportant un nouveau souffle à la scène bruxelloise. Très vite, on remarque la profondeur de son timbre et sa dextérité instrumentale, tant à la guitare qu’aux claviers. Le voici embarqué sur scène auprès d’autres artistes comme François & The Atlas Mountains.

C’est en 2018 que son destin bascule, lorsqu’il tourne avec Charlotte Gainsbourg pour l’album Rest. Dans ses chambres d’hôtel, mué par une envie irrépressible de s’exprimer, il écrit et s’enregistre, armé d’un micro et d’une carte son. Car la musique, pour David, est davantage qu’une passion, c’est un monde refuge où il fuit la dure réalité, où il laisse libre cours à ses émotions, sans mentir et sans mettre de côté sa vocation d’entertainer.

Après la tournée avec Charlotte, il accompagne en studio ou sur scène Sébastien Tellier, Nicolas Godin ou encore SebastiAn, mais n’en oublie pas moins ses chansons. À l’été 2020, il s’illustre avec « Le Fisc de l’Amour », suivi quelques mois plus tard par « Beats ! » dont il a réalisé lui-même le clip, apprenant au débotté les subtilités de l’animation. Autobiographique, léger comme une bulle de savon qui refuse cependant d’exploser, « Beats ! » tient, selon Philippe Katerine himself, de « l’orfèvrerie ». Car si la musique de David Numwami semble a priori facile, cette évidence a été façonnée des mois durant, en huis clos, où il a joué de tous les instruments dans une chambre prêtée par un hôtel bruxellois – avant d’être masterisée en studio par Rémy Lebbos.

BRNS' fourth album, Celluloid Swamp, is a mutant chamber pop album with a smorgasbord of references spliced into sound only just recognisable as a guitar band. The Brussels-based four-piece sound more overtly settled as outsiders in a mainstream space. BRNS is more boldly aligned to the neo-dadaist manifesto laid out as the parameters for the band at its genesis in 2010: to make music free of inhibition; a space where anything goes. Whether that be in production (taking a cut and paste approach to smash apart what they initially intended and reassemble it) or in genre (embracing R&B into their indie-rock DNA) - or at myriad other aspects in its assembly - inventiveness poured out of BRNS in the three years spent creating this record like never before.

The left-field R&B-tinge of drummer/singer Timothée Philippe's vocals is one of the most radical aspects of the record, since it breaks the indie rock/pop tropes BRNS is most associated with. The Frank Ocean-esque track 'Suffer', which is seethingly vengeful in its lyrical content, is one of the tracks most evocative of their newly-adopted sound.

But what's clear is when the album looks set to tread a softer pop feel, it's never far from subversion. Keyboardist/bassist Antoine Meersseman, in particular, is crafty at this: his taste for vintage outboard gear means the honeyed melodies - like the song 'Money' has in droves - become underpinned by beautiful, cosmic outpourings of emotion that are ruggedly analog and atypical in pop.

Guitarist Diego Leyder, meanwhile, recorded with a cockpit of effect pedals in a way that probes the outer limits of his instrument’s capability. With it not always being easy to decipher where the guitar ends and the synth starts, it means normative timbre expectations are pleasingly left at the door. That said, Leyder lays down some barnstorming rock riffs - such as opener 'Get Something' and 'Lighthouses' - which are unmistakably a homage to the power of the guitar. The latter cut is one of a number of tracks on the album to feature enigmatic BRNS newcomer Nele De Gussem on vocals. She has tapped into the chemistry of the band instantaneously. De Gussem's vocals hit in a way on 'Lighthouses' that's not unlike Régine Alexandra Chassagne of Arcade Fire.

The album was recorded in Brooklyn, New York’s Studio G, and at a residential recording studio in the Catskills called Outlier Inn, which are both home to beautiful old Neve desks, over the course of a week. And they were in good hands when they made the trip to the States. Grammy-nominated Alexis Berthelot, who had produced Moses Sumney and Gojira - to name a couple - is a resident in said studios, and the then three-piece (De Gussem joined later in the process) drafted him in as co-producer. BRNS’ modus operandi on their three previous albums - Wounded, Patine and Sugar High - was to take full creative control of the sound. But Berthelot, who they met at SXSW Texas years previously, was the long-targeted producer and the album became collaborative, thus maximising the sonic ingenuity on display.

D’une époque totalement paradoxale à Paradoxant, il n’y a qu’un pas. À franchir en fermant les yeux et sans réfléchir. Échappé du groupe BRNS, le multi- instrumentiste Antoine Meersseman est le corps et l’esprit de Paradoxant. Née d’une profonde remise en question, sa musique tend naturellement vers le changement, la radicalité, le danger, des mélodies pop, hantées et instantanées, mais aussi, et surtout, vers davantage de liberté.

Au plus près de ses intuitions artistiques, ‘Earworm’ collecte des mélodies mutantes, quelques rythmes délicieusement cabossés, du groove et d’étranges matières synthétiques. Sous une noirceur apparente, cet enregistrement regorge pourtant d’espoir et de secrets bien gardés. Entre surdité, sensualité et envies d’ailleurs, les morceaux reflètent l’émergence d’un nouveau paradigme et d’infinies possibilités.

Dans le sillage des chapitres écrits par des formations comme Crack Cloud, Suuns, Clinic ou Liars, le récit de Paradoxant s’est étoffé grâce aux contributions d’Antoine Pasqualini (Monolithe Noir) et Romain Bernard (Ropoporose), complices croisés dans les coulisses de la scène bruxelloise ou le temps d’un supergroupe nommé Namdose. Sinueux, aventureux et jalonnés d’instants épiques, ‘Earworm’ ouvre une porte sur le monde de demain.

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Belgian dream pop six-piece Uma Chine craft unusually bewitching music. The new band has two albums under its belt - the debut self-titled (2019) and Changes (2021) - which have been beautifully received by the music press in the Benelux region press and beyond. The most eye-catching endorsement yet has come from Belgium's godfathers of synth music dEUS. dEUS asked Uma Chine to play at their party in Antwerp, which is a pinch yourself moment for any purveyor of futuristic music through analog gear.

Uma Chine being at the forefront of the Belgian alternative scene comes partly thanks to frontwoman and principal composer Nele De Gussem. De Gussem has been in some of the country's great modern bands before -- BRNS, Maya's Moving Castle, Future Old People Are Wizards. But it's in Uma Chine you hear an artist embarking on their most personal work to date, whilst conceding that the idea of the self is perhaps an egoistic social construct, and that truly divine ideas pass through you.

“I believe that the most important ideas come to us, they want to impose themselves on our consciousness. The only thing we can do is listen quietly and examine them without fear, ” says De Gussem, with the air of a Victorian auteur.

With her dream catcher in thoroughly good order, the sound of magical-realism as pop ensues, strikingly so on the new album, Changes. It’s a largely blissed-out listen accented by an embrace of the odd. A case in point is the shifts from shoegaze-y dream pop to tribal drum wig-outs on lead single 'Visits'. Or the era-blending 'The Frog', where dirty synth bass intertwining dazed folk-y fireside vocals. The singers have an eeriness to sound truly like oracles. Meanwhile, 'Changes' offers the unexpected as analog oscillators make way for a cranky burst of lead guitar.

De Gussem comes across, ultimately, like the luckiest composer in the world to have such enigmatic co-singers in her presence in sisters Rana and Sherien Holail Mohamed. Meanwhile, the band musicians Simon Raman (drums - Ivy Falls, Steiger), Nils Vermeulen (bass - Jukwaa) and Gilles Vandecaveye-Pinoy (Synths - Steiger, Peenoise) all pull in the same musical direction to make this a perfectionist psychedelia, with everything feeling like it's justified as a texture on a trained musical level, with the puzzles worked out in her dreams.

This blend of articulate classicism with truly tasteful production ideas will see Uma Chine blast far into orbit and remain one of THE bands to know in 21st century music.