S.H.A.M.A.N.E.S – Anne Paceo

In S.H.A.M.A.N.E.S, Anne Paceo begins with one of music’s oldest combinations —voice and percussion— to ask how far they can be taken from the present. Rituals from Bali, Haiti, Siberia, and Brazil lie at the origins of the album, but not as materials to be replicated. Paceo absorbs them until they become something else: eleven pieces in which rhythm can induce trance, sustain a song, or almost disappear as the voices take over the space.

“Wide Awake” establishes that freedom from the outset. Paceo’s drums and Benjamin Flament’s metallic universe build an insistent pulse over which the song moves with an energy close to pop and rock. That opening matters because it resists any predictable reading of the album’s concept: S.H.A.M.A.N.E.S does not need to sound ancestral to question what connects us to the ancestral.

The voice then assumes another function. In “Reste un oiseau,” Paceo, Isabel Sörling, and Marion Rampal turn singing into an extension of rhythm, while Christophe Panzani and Tony Paeleman become part of music that seems to breathe before it counts beats. The bird that moves through the album as a spiritual figure becomes associated with movement, with the possibility of escaping and observing the world from somewhere else.

In “Wishes,” that expansiveness contracts until fragility is exposed, while “Healing” restores repetition’s ability to transform. The architecture of the group becomes decisive here: Flament does not simply function as a second drummer, but expands Paceo’s vocabulary through his metallophone; Paeleman, moving between piano, Fender Rhodes, and Bass Station, continually reshapes the harmonic density; and Panzani’s saxophones and bass clarinet move in and out of the fabric without claiming a permanent center.

“L’Aube” seems to emerge from that state. The voices leave spaces, the instruments respond, and the music acquires a suspended quality, as though awakening also meant recognizing what remains invisible. By the time “Travellers” and “Marcher jusqu’à la nuit” lead the album toward its end, the journey announced by its title no longer requires specific geographies.

S.H.A.M.A.N.E.S ultimately speaks less about rituals than about a human need that precedes them: finding ways to move through what we do not understand. Anne Paceo finds one in rhythm, another in the voice, and a third in collective listening. Everything else happens in that difficult-to-name space that emerges when all three begin to breathe together.