From time to time, a young girl with a frail body and a slim voice turn out to be the instruments of vast breath and prodigious power. Kyrie Kristmanson is one of them: at the age of twenty she has a unique way of provoking incredible collisions between the Folk of North America and the music of medieval times, pop melodies and cutting-edge jazz, and between everyday songs and the laboratory where great musical revolutions are concocted. Origin of Stars, her first album for the No Format! label, allows us to hear not only a melodic writing-style close to that of her great predecessors but, at the same time, an audacity of form that brings the paths taken by the sources, practices and aesthetics of music to interweave. The result sounds something like an acoustic meeting between Joni Mitchell and Björk…
Could her name have anything to do with this? Her first name is Kyrie, the Greek word for "Lord" which gave its name to the first acclamation in the Latin and orthodox religious Mass. And her second, Kristmanson, an Icelandic name, means "the Christian's son". Yet her previous album, self-produced in Canada, carried the title Pagan Love...
Her father, a musician, had his own home-studio, and evenings in the house had a certain ritual: the father's songs would lull the little girl to sleep. They were quickly replaced by the sounds of PJ Harvey, Sinead O’Connor and Daniel Lanois... Kyrie was born in Ottawa and travelled in her childhood, to Montreal, London, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan. There, in the heart of the Canadian wilderness, "winter is extremely cold and summer extremely hot and dry. I wondered why people lived there and it took me a while to understand. In fact, the beauty of the landscape is awesome. You are often the only vertical object in a totally horizontal landscape. You have the feeling you're naked and vulnerable, but you can yell and sing without any inhibitions because there's nobody there. You take inspiration from it..."
Her first guitar came when she was nine; her first trumpet followed at thirteen, her first songs a year later, and she produced her own first album when she was seventeen. She balks at the suggestion that she was precocious: "The writer puts the song to paper but didn't necessarily write it. A good song takes generations to suddenly spring up; it exists before the singer. If you're sensitive enough, you can feel the people and the world in the story, and concentrate it all into three minutes of song. But that's only 10% of the process."
So where does the rest come from? Kyrie Kristmanson gives a beautiful smile: "I get the impression that in Europe they don't believe in ghosts as much as they do in Canada. Our whole story isn't concentrated like yours inside old churches and old castles; it lies in the earth in the shape of raw energy." Maybe that's why her songs so often speak of the wind, the sky and the night... the folk-music of a medium in some way…
In France she came to the attention of spectators at the Printemps de Bourges Festival in 2009, and singer Emily Loizeau invited Kyrie to open for her at concerts. She's currently readying to move to Paris, where she's due to write a thesis at Sorbonne University on the trobairitz, the Occitan female troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries. And Kyrie Kristmanson has never stopped touring, with her guitar (itself three-quarters the size of a child), her weird, white, woolly hats, her trumpet, and her songs inhabited by very ancient, powerful energies.
