_Clementine Blue _portrait

_portrait

Where does your performance name come from?

‘It’s very simple, I like blue and that’s the name I used on social media a long time ago. I kept it, and I think ’Blue corresponds to me. It’s appeasing, and it’s the complementary color of orange!’

Your music is very unique, how did you find your musical style?

I was in a band which was pop and much more dance, less adventurous in sounds..I felt I was not always able to express myself individually, then it really matured in my head at that moment.

The first aesthetics in which I was interested were ‘desert blues’, Tuared nomads, groups like Tinariwen, Terakaft…

They are nomads who started electronic music with something of a hypnotizing trance. 

What attracted me first was to find a mixture between all the aesthetics of the desert, I liked the idea of having very acoustic sounds raw, natural mixed with very produced and artificial sounds, to have this collision of two worlds that do not meet naturally.

It’s an idea that I had from the beginning which has evolved a lot, inspired from a range of environmental sounds to Indian music (I went on a trip for two months in India) the album is the result of a slow evolution.

How did you find the idea of creating a booklet (artzine) to go with your album? And in particular using the technique of risograph?

I had already made an EP book in square format like small vinyl, and I liked the idea of making a photo book, a visual book that goes with a piece music. It’s really a way to extend the visual part and push the concept further.

Risograph is a Japanese technique that was a way of photocopying at low cost. But it turns out that it is also an ecological way of printing as the inks are soy based and I liked the printing effect visually.

It’s bit like printing a film photo, with grains, imperfections, and unforeseen things. I had no way of knowing what it was going to be until it was all printed out.

How did you start doing film photography?

More than 10 years ago, I wanted to get into film photography because I was starting to travel more with my band.

I got the camera that my grandparents had given to my parents who then gave it to me: there is something beautiful in it, an object that remains from generation to generation.

It’s also a coincidence because this camera had a 50mm lens that I really liked, an accident that in the end can define me on a whole project, in the end I’m just trying to have fun with it.

Clementine Blue photographed all the photos in film herself in Japan: this is the starting point of her inspiration and the heart of her album ’Floating world’

How did you get inspired by Japan in particular ?

First, I fell in love with Miyazaki’s movies a long time ago, as something inexplicable I felt very attracted to this country.

I think I am very attracted to the refinement of this culture, a celebration of beauty and harmony which I feel is a true philosophy of life.

I wanted to go to Japan to learn. As a lesson of humility to imbue me with a world and a culture that would be very far from what I already know.

What in particular did you try to translate from your trip inthis album?

There is something a little bit spiritual in many of the photos that I took during a pilgrimage journey.

I went to a place in Japan called Mount Koya-san, in the city of Wakayama. 

This is a place that a few people told me about where a branch of Buddhism was founded. There is a huge temple and a monk cemetery.

It is a mountain that is in the middle of a lotus flower formed by other mountains around.. So there is a pilgrimage path that I was able to make in the rain in May 2018.

I also did a piece of the nakasando road in the kisson valley, an old road that goes from Kyoto to Tokyo with stops called ‘post towns’ some villages have really remained intact.

Pilgrimage routes are something I would like to develop, explore and document.

Document in film photography and take an interest in the plants more specifically that are on these paths, and concise these paths as a kind of collective memory. So many people walk these roads, I’d like to approach it from this angle.

Before going to Japan, how did you see Japanese culture?

Bashô’s Haiku: Someone gifted me a book of Bashô. It is a book about a pilgrimage along the seasons.

Hokusai: He is a huge reference for me for his aesthetic. I remember visiting an exhibition about the 36 views of the Mount Fuiji. The Ukiyo-e aesthetic, ‘pictures of the floating world’, that’s where the name of the album comes from, I find that this pretty much transcribes the aesthetic of the music. It’s a visual universe that moves me. A delicate way to paint nature, animals, landscape and feminine beauty. But also, about leisure and pleasure. 

I like all the anecdotes around Hokusai, he is a mischievous character.

_BIG SPACES

What is your relationship with nature?

I grew up surrounded by nature in quite isolated place.

I come from the countryside near Anger, France and my parents lived in an unusual house, a kind of manor, but it was quite rock and roll to live in without central heating, 

there was a lake, poplars, weeping trees… It was an extraordinary childhood.

I lived in London for 3 to 4 years, but it’s really a relief to have moved to Margate in a quieter place, where I can walk and see the sea…

We feel that nature is very present in your universe, we feel the very strong link between nature and the body, a personal nature in large spaces but very intimate at the same time

There is for me a very close relationship between the body and the landscape. 

I made a photographic project called ‘body- landscape’, photographs of female bodies in parallel with nature, I wanted to find a dialogue and a relationship between the two.

When I take pictures of naked bodies, I am in search of purity, of desexualizing the female body and looking for aesthetics where people might say “I have a body too” try to normalize instead of trying to hiding it.

What moves you in an artistic project?

I think going somewhere and trying to link my trip to an artistic project, to bring something back from it.. traveling is essential for me.

Afterwards, being in confinement was a kind of inner journey for me too. You have time.

I have a few recordings during this period of things not really finished. It allowed me to disconnect a little and not think about sad things.

The lockdown was a time when I had a slightly simpler life, without forcing it, going to the market, cooking, enjoying the moment.

You are often inspired by travel, what was your mindset when you decided to travel alone to Japan?

I lived in London and found it very suffocating.

And when I left for Japan, I was coming out of a tour or I had been in a van for 2 weeks.

Flying to Japan alone was a kind of liberation: I will finally be able to hear myself think and go to places where there is silence and beauty.

In Japan there is a language of sound very different from Europe: the sounds of birds, different songs, insects… I had this desire to go towards something that I did not know, to go into the forest and record sounds and take pictures to document it

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