作曲家、
作词家、
音乐制作人Guy Sigsworth和歌星 Imogen Heap 组成的
英国组合。
简介
风格类型:
乐队网址:
发表专辑:
Details (2002) MCA/Island Records
Breathe In (Single) (2002)
Must Be Dreaming
It's Good To Be In Love
乐队成立背景
Frou Frou 这个词出自
波德莱尔的一首
诗,意指年轻佻丽的女性舞动中裙子发出的声音。当
作曲家,作词家,
音乐制作人Guy Sigsworth和歌星 Imogen Heap 组成Frou Frou这个
英国组合的时候,他们无疑要表达的是女性的声音。Guy Sigsworth回忆道:“一位
法国诗人曾经说过,人的一生之中必须到红磨坊里看那些美丽的舞女,而裙摆飞旋时发出的摩擦声便称做‘FROU FROU’。当我第一次听到Imogen Heap的歌声时,‘FROU FROU’这个词便飘入我的脑海。” 我绝对同意Guy Sigsworth的话,Imogen Heap的声音是最近几年给我印象比较深刻的女声,难得一见的气音音质,不痛苦不做作,无时无刻渗透着丝丝阳光的味道。
乐队风格
Frou Frou的大方向是电音,而两人血脉里的Band Sound令音乐里充满了热情的摇滚风貌。immi的
声音魅力以及演唱上的技巧令他们的作品在创作上有着十分宽泛的可能性,甚至你会感觉只有他们写不出来的,没有immi唱不出来的。尤其是热门作品Must Be Dreaming的旋律创作,若是没有immi,是怎么也不会写得那么趣怪又流畅。创作、
演唱、
编曲、演奏及制作都是一流水准,再加上immi个性造型与气质,不红都不行。
他们俩的合作早在1998年immi制作她第一张个人专辑的时候就开始了,Guy曾经为Björk和Madonna先后制作过
歌曲。当他们俩决定合作并组建一个双人团体的时候,对
法国文化有着特殊情节的Guy便以Frou Frou这个来自波特莱诗歌中的词汇来命名
乐队,因为这个词读起来十分象裙摆滑过舞蹈中的美女的玉腿时发出的性感声音,呵呵!Guy在唱片中说如果没有immi就没有他,这话说得似乎并不过份,因为在Frou Frou之前,他的那些制作经历并没有象如今这般被人关注和认可。
What's the deal with Frou Frou in 2006?
Since the end of their promotional duties for debut album 'Details' in 2003, both members of Frou Frou (Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth) have been working on individual projects. At the moment Imogen and Guy do not have any plans to make another Frou Frou album, however neither has ruled this out and they are both very active with their current projects, read on to find out more...
Like so many others you may have discovered Frou Frou through the movie Garden State? Or maybe you found Frou Frou early-on when debut album 'Details' was released and they toured the U.S. in 2002/3? Either way, you discovered the band and loved the album? Well, here's how the story goes.....
Both members of Frou Frou (Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth) have been working on individual projects since 2004. Meanwhile their previous collaboration Frou Frou gained more and more acclaim. This new found success was largely due to the song 'Let Go' being included on the Grammy Award winning 'Garden State' soundtrack. Ironically, over a year after the promotional period for the band's debut album 'Details' ended, and band members began to work on individual projects, Frou Frou became more popular than ever! It was almost as if everyone got in on the secret just a little too late. The good news is that both Imogen and Guy are both working on new projects.
Imogen Heap released her brand new solo album 'Speak For Yourself' in the USA on Novermber 1st 2005 via RCA Victor. The album, (which is also out in her native UK) includes the digital hit single '
Hide & Seek' which you may have already heard on TV show 'The OC'! To find out more about 'Speak For Yourself' and Immi's upcoming tour dates,
Guy Sigsworth, the male-axis of Frou Frou continues to write and produce songs for some of todays biggest names in music, as well as working with upcoming musicians. Check out WikiPedia for more info on Guy's work - his official website will be launched in the coming months!
Frou Frou Official Biog - Circa 2002
If the challenge for a pair of skilled musical parfumiers is to connect up all five senses and create a sixth realm of heightened emotion, rediscovered memory and awakened dreaming, the debut album by Frou Frou is an olfactory breakthrough. A couple of lifetimes in the preparing, 'Details' is as hyper-evocative a record as the post-digital era has yet produced.
Out of a technique that erases its own ingenuity, singer-songwriter Imogen Heap and songwriter-producer and part time Francophile, Guy Sigsworth, have summoned up a supersensual song-world of whispered intimacy,firefly dances, sky-kissing elation, opiated warmth, pillows, bliss, fingertips, half-light, swirls, curlicues, closeness, interpersonal dissonance and captured stillness. Oh yes, and the swishing of erotically charged silk.
There's too much gilt and bombast in Heaven to imagine that the creative marriage between producer-songwriter Guy Sigsworth and former solo-chanteuse Imogen Heap was made celestially. More likely their pre-nuptials took place in a magic balloon drifting high over the the pitted landscape of contemporary digitally derived music. Since working with Seal at the start of his career, Guy has gone on to prove himself a, if not the supreme producer of female vocals, collaborating extensively with Bjork and attracting Madonna's attention. Imogen's debut solo album, made when she was still a teenager, clearly demonstrated that here was a singer of astonishing emotional eloquence.
Frou Frou is therefore an ideal dovetailing of voice and vision. The pair first collaborated when Guy produced 'Getting Scared' from Imogen's 98 album 'I Megaphone'. As a passionate fan of great singers Guy had sought out the owner of the precocious voice he'd heard on a demo tape. Working together on a longform project then became a matter of obligation to the world of ravishing, high pop.
So working with Imogen just made sense because she's such a fantastic singer. And I'm such a snob about voices. I don't mean they have to be technically perfect, but when someone has a voice like Imogen you can just run with it wherever your fantasy takes you.
When I was working with Bjork once, we did a show on the White Room and amazingly Liz Frazer from the Cocteau Twins had sneaked in to watch Bjork, and
Sinead O'Connor was on with the Pogues. There was this one Kodak moment where there was Sinead, Bjork and Liz talking to each other, and that was my three favourite singers on earth, all in a ring for a moment.But then I found someone who I love even more. I think Imogen's got so much to show people about vocals.
'Details' does not scream at you. It talks to you intimately, in real language, with a sonic articulacy unparalleled in recent times. Neither electronic or trad organic, it invents its own sound language without being self consciously radical. Naturally it didn't come together overnight after a binge and a game of soccer with the effects rack. The Frou Frou sessions spanned several seasons at the turn of the century, Guy working on the big picture upstairs in his west London studio, and Imogen downstairs, in a room full of cellos,auto harps, guitars, mad keyboards, Indian drums, toys, books and a mirror to dance in.
With the exception of the (gorgeous) trumpet solo on 'Dumbing Down Of Love', played by occasional Eno collaborator John Hassell, and a purl of orchestration from Bombay, the sounds woven into 'Details' were mostly generated by Imogen and Guy, feeding keyboards, guitars and briefly handbells into the computer. The passages where it appears there's an orchestra under the duvet came from the multi-tracking of a single violin and lone Swedish double bassist Mitch Gerber.
An album which embraces technology whilst humanising it, 'Details' leads the listener into a tender and lovely headspace through Imogen's voice. Much of the instrumentation was put in around an intial, early take vocal. Guy and Imogen co-wrote many of the lyrics, refusing to put in implausible lines and seeking to create a conversational truthfulness within the songs Textures, tones and moods shift through the record. Let Go' achieves a state of scintillant equanimity; 'Breathe In' is as carefree as completion; 'I Must Be Dreaming' soars above self doubt; 'Psychobabble' teeters on the edge; 'Only Got One' reassures; 'Details' cruises towards self-knowledge; 'Hear Me Out' holds on to a connection; 'Flicks' celebrates; 'Dumbing Down Of Love' curls inwards, unfurling perhaps one of the key lines of the album: 'Music is worthless unless it can make a complete stranger breakdown and cry'
The desire to reach out and touch without using the obvious attention grabbing techniques is rooted in Imogen and Guy's past. In solo guise Imogen carried her keyboard though five American tours. Guy worked as musical director for Bjork's live shows. Neither would have been content to settle for anything less than graphic enchantment.
If 'Details' get caught up in the rapture, that’s not because Guy and Imogen are unaware of the shadier end of the musical spectrum. The subtleties and clarities within Frou Frou are the result of deep experience and constant exploration. Imogen's accelerated journey from South London college to signed up solo artist threw her into the middle of the musical bazaar before prejudices could set in. In between her solo album and Frou Frou she recorded with London jazz rap ensemble Urban Species. Still only 21 she's now as likely to be listening to the Aphex Twin as seeking out Finnish composers.
Guy's initial co-writing work with Seal came about because the singer was then living in a neighbouring London squat. From there he came across a series of like-minded artists, hooking up with Tim 'Bomb The Bass' Simonon, Talvin Singh and Bjork. It was not, however, his co-writing work with Bjork that attracted Madonna's attention, but his production of the debut album by the under-rated Mandalay. The Mandalay album failed to go
overground but Madonna loved it and called in Guy, leading to his co-writing 'What It Feels Like For A Girl' on 'Music'.
If there are facets of Frou Frou which appear to owe as much to fringe music as to pop, it should come as no surprise. Guy's vast enthusiasm makes him one of the most widely analytical of current artist producers. It would not be unusual to find that in an hour of weighing up Frou Frou's place in the schene of things, he has also digressed into the guitar layering of My Bloody Valentine, the influence of UK ragga on two step, the connection between Kraftwerk and Africa Bambaata, the interface of Euro angst and disco, 2 Unlimited's debt to the cancan, ring tones on rap records and the brilliance of David Sylvian's 'Ghosts'.
As a musician, you love lots of things and then you gradually work out, OK yes I love nu- metal, gangsta rap and classical music but then you start thinking 'What is it I can do that other people don't do? Cause I love ragga music but I wouldn't try and do it. So you think 'What is it I can do and as a producer, what can bring to the table?
I just hope we can open people's horizons. Because I think some people are very innovative with soundscapes, but they don't write songs, and I think the song is still very important to me. I still think that form is great even if the sounds are a bit unusual. I think its a classical way to express what you're feeling.