Francesca Heart – Sphinx Nouvelle (2024)

‘Sphinx Nouvelle’ (A New Sphinx, A Sphinx Tale) is Francesca Heart’s fourth solo album following LP Bird Bath. After different musical works dedicated to mercurial underwater epics, electrical biomass sagas, moist demigoddesses’ grottoes, labyrinthine gardens and somber yet alluring feminine muses, the artist crafts ten new tracks inspired by aerial architectures, legendary superhuman creatures and music as the key to open magic portals.

Produced between Thailand, Italy and Mallorca, and thus reflective of the geographic collages offered by memory and experience, the work’s sibylline title opens up two layers touching upon both the imaginative and emotional growth of the Italian artist. While on one level the tracks non-narratively delineate the hazy story of a sphinx figure unfurling and fleshing out as the musical compositions progress, a second perspective sheds light on how Heart’s expression and explorations have matured generating new ways to empowerment from within the field of musical playfulness and creative intuition.

Informed by speculative mythologies offered by hidden earthly geographies such as Atlantis and Lemuria, Heart crafts a new powerful adventure by dwelling on how promethean real-life projects such as the Qatar Raffle Doha and Fairmont Hotels (the Katara Towers) could be reinterpreted as molochian present-day results of human imagination. Empires of artificial waters that challenge the limits of the possible. These monumental entities are treated as fictional objects becoming important encounters on the Sphinx's journey, through which Heart blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.

In A Sphinx Nouvelle sound and music are a cocooning background vessel for a vague cinema for the ear; a moving image playing in the theater of the listeners’ mind. As the aesthetic feeling emanating from the album confirms, once again we are not in front of a world built by adult power fantasies. By casting these real-life architectural visions into the background of pop culture’s productions like movies Magic In The Mirror, The Abyss and Nadia The Secret Of Blue Water, Sphynx Nouvelle lets us look at architectures, stories and mythologies with a kaleidoscopic mind.

Mixing real and fictive histories, worlds and dimensions collide and superimpose like mirages of seashore mists and waterspouts. In the album, the character itself, a mythical anthropozoomorphic creature-monument defies conventional narrative expectations and categorisations, hence becoming the passage to weave together different dimensions and sonic territories. Despite still consistently resorting to soft synth lines and the organic acoustic timbres of marimbas and bells, differently from previous albums, percussive arpeggios and angular melodies feel more pronounced, making the ten tracks the most dynamic and uptempo productions in the artist’s discography. Despite maintaining most of her musical tropes - multivocal synth progressions as counterpoints of singing creatures, lullaby-inspired pentatonic harmonies and pads filtered through the noise of waves crashing ashore or the filters of underwater listening - the moonlight tide ambiences and sonatas feels like a background on which more stable rhythmical explorations take over to reveal subtle but galvanizing outbursts of musical energy. New age meets seapunk and shoegaze. A dive into a hallucinatory expedition on winged eyes leads to a primordial space via the call of the conch shell.