Image via Baptiste Le Quiniou //
Journey through ‘The Journey’….
French producer Folamour is definitely one you should be familiar with if you consider yourself a lover of EDM or soul. Crafting a multitude of uplifting tunes since his debut album Chapeuau rouge in 2015, the producer-extraordinaire has made it his life’s work to spread feeling and unity across the world; his otherworldly DJ sets, multi-dimensional releases and everything in between a haven for all of the above while cementing him as one of the most dynamic producers to burst onto the scene in recent years.
However, his story isn’t like most producers or DJs, garnering global attention for dropping Abba in a Boiler Room. It’s safe to say that countless people reduced the French producer to that mere two minutes for years; an act that would frustrate any artist and songwriter (understandably so). Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to receive such wide attention and have access to the opportunities that result from it, but Folamour is just so much more than those two minutes. He’s a producer, creator and most importantly, a uniter, and he’s reaffirming all of the above with each and every creation.
His latest album The Journey sees the musical maestro take an inter-dimensional voyage into the depths of his soul, experimenting with mood and sound as he subverts all expectations placed upon him. There’s no labelling or confining it to one single genre, it’s an album of the planetary variety; a body of work for all lovers of sonic thrill. From the jazzy swank fest ‘Rue de Paradis’ featuring Tertia May to the kaleidoscopic gateway in ‘We Gotta Wake This World Up From Its Sleep,’ the funk lord is plethora of feeling on the LP, and it’s exhilarating to experience.
We caught up with the French producer for a track-by-track deep dive into the album. Check it below.
Uno Waterfall
I always work differently for the beginning and the ending of a project than for the rest of the project. The main reason being that it needs to open and close doors while carrying a certain weight of helping the listener to be taken on a trip through my story. On The Journey, I decided to start with contemplation.
While travelling the world to play music, I sometimes found myself in beautiful places, lost in their magnificence, while feeling various emotions from loneliness to exhaustion, to sadness even sometimes, and this painting by Katsushika Hokusai that’s been hanging in my room for years carries these diverse feelings and the fight between beauty and reality. This seemed like a great place to start our travels.
The Journey feat. Zeke Manyika
After the contemplation, it’s time to take off and the second song of the album is about immigration, about leaving your country hoping for a better life, leaving your people and the life you’ve always known for a new world.
One side of my family left Algeria and the other side left Italy to come to France, and I left France in turn for London. Immigration has always been one of the cores of my music and in a way the whole album is about being stateless.
Kwese Kwese,
Kwatinoenda.
Kwakasiyana, Kwakafanana.
Everywhere Everywhere,
Where we go,
Is different, Is the same.
Resonate
The Journey as an album about telling the story and everything I felt during the last three years, there is one topic that seems to come back to my mind, again and again, that I’ve been living with for a long time now: nowadays, people leave.
It might sound naïve to many but I’ve always been struggling with how, at this point of time, we struggle to keep our loved ones close to us. We normalise leaving to the other side of the world for work, to escape, to study and more, and it isolates us in a way that we don’t even think about it anymore. I don’t think it was better in the past, 500 years ago when humanity was living in a 50km perimeter and mostly leaving this one to go to war, but I can also appreciate how easier it was to have the people you cherish the most living in the same area you were, always down the road for everyone to gather anytime.I decided to turn this story into a love one, being left and hoping the other person will find happiness there and maybe you’ll find each other again later down our path.
Rue de Paradis feat. Tertia May
I remember these summer nights, driving through the hills in Marseille, the windows opened and the music on, laughing and singing, the hot wind stroking us softly while the city was scrolling in front of our eyes. We’d fall asleep next to the pool, carried away by the song of the Mistral and the trees jamming at once, dreaming of what the night will be made of. Nothing felt important back then but the end of the summer and “Rue de Paradis” is a tribute to all the details I can still feel inside me like I never left. “I drink coffee on my own, watch the shadows dance on stones”.
Mumma’s cooking our favourite food, flowers falling into the pool. Feel the honey on my skin, birds are singing in the wind, I breathe the joy it tastes like heaven, I wish it’d last forever.
Latécoère
“Latécoère” was an aviator who helped developing airplanes able to fly to America during the first half of the 20th century and travelling the world on a weekly basis, sometimes I just want to fly to Cuba, have a drink with a friend somewhere, read a book, appreciate life and the slowness of it there.I want to smell coffee, spices in the street. I want to see people dancing in the streets with music coming out of a boom box, I want to lie down in a quiet garden, listening to the world happening around me. It’s something I experience often and “Latécoère” is a tribute to all these dreams of reality I take with me while touring.
I decided to turn this story into a love one, being left and hoping the other person will find happiness there and maybe you’ll find each other again later down our path.
Lost in Space feat. SG Lewis
This album surely was my hardest to give birth to. First, because it’s my most personal, on every level of creation, the themes and topics I’m talking about here are the deepest I could sing or write about.
Loneliness has been part of my life for quite a time now, mostly due to never being at the same place for more than two days but also because my life has always been lonely. Sometimes, touring can feel like an astronaut sent to outer space to find a new planet for humanity to live on, who lost radio contact with Earth and is now just wandering through space, trying his best to not fall into madness.
St Moskov
Our trip’s next stop is to Moscow. Touring the world a lot often means spending a lot of time in cold places. I’m not specifically speaking about litteral cold but rough, unwelcoming places. Airports and hotels were my life for two years before the lockdown and even though I started having resentment towards them they were also a place of great inspiration.
My creativity is always rooted to some weird feelings and this song was written on a plane, during one of those weeks with no humans to talk to, only awful lights and airport fast food smells. Like Moscow, this song is about toughness and poetry, the balance between the crushing bassline and the softness of the strings and trumpets symphony.
Truth
2019 was the heaviest year of my life. Mostly because I’ve done 140 shows in 12 months, culminating with my first Boiler Room set in the middle of the year with everything following like an avalanche chasing me, but also because I released my second album, Ordinary Drugs that year, a deeply personal project, a big step going towards the music I’ve always dreamed to create. I learned many things to be able to get closer to it and it was a lot to manage on top of touring almost every day. It was also a year of disappointment, in my personal life but also in my music. It can be hard to have worked so hard to create great music, to play beautiful music and one minute thirty of your life is crushing everything like a tsunami.
After my Boiler Room, I was reduced to that moment by so many people that for 6 months, everyday I was hearing the same sentences, over and over again. They were coming out of love, mostly, but were still hurting. Hearing your one song, that I had to thank this for my career (which was obviously false), that people were expecting me to play the song like I’m a jukebox or an app, it was breaking me day after day. I needed to get the power back on this and I decided to keep focusing on music and to not pay attention. I also needed to express these feelings in a song and this is when I wrote “Truth.”
“I write my nindo on the walls between two paints of worlds I’m only dreaming of. Ono Waterfall, and am I colorblind to not see that I’d shine deep in the darkest nights.”
We Gotta Wake This World Up From It’s Sleep
Paying attention to what’s happening in the world, reading a lot, caring about how others feel can isolate one and slowly dig a hole in his brain where rain will flow. Sometimes I feel like we’re asleep. I see a lot of love while touring or creating music but I also see anger, hate, selfishness, ignorance. Many of us put to sleep their empathy towards people, forgetting we’re all linked in a big web of causes and consequences, of emotion flows and I struggle to understand why behaving like that except fear and bigotry.
This is a song about hope, love and unity. I still believe that talking, sharing and learning are the only way out of being a wolf to another human, waking up is the first step.
My Brother’s Keeper
My loved ones, my friends, have always been my fuel, my life. After talking about loneliness, loss, abandonment, dreams, love, who I am, South of France, the summer and more, it felt natural and obligatory to me to express how important the people around me are to how I feel, how I grow as an artist to their influence on everything I am.
I wanted to create a song like a rollercoaster, not like I did on “Just Want Happiness” where it was more about the four seasons of life but like a friendship can be. It’s not always highs and being together, it can be challenging and tough but real ones always make it through. To all my friends, I love you.
La Fin des Vacances
Being born in southern France, my life has always been followed by the rhythm of grasshoppers, pines, wildfires and silent hills.
It’s also a place about love for me and sometimes even, the loss of it. When I wrote the song, I tried to recreate what I felt being there, from the heat and ice cubes melting in my glass to the joy of seeing my people there, the sadness of leaving, the crackling of the flames approaching and more. I wrote a whole book where this specific feeling of ending is the main character and I decided to turn it into a song.
“Le bruit des glaçons, l’odeur des sapins, j’en oublie de danser. Allongé dans l’herbe, la musique au loin, je regarde le cendrier déborder. L’incendie qui nous court après, l’envie de me laisser tomber. Un par un ont disparu, toutes les personnes que j’ai été.”
Just Want Happiness
“Just Want Happiness” closes The Journey while telling its tale in a new form. The album concept story is all about an initiation rite, learning how to overcome loneliness, ups and downs, symphonies of emotions without ever truly finding out the key but still getting better every day.
At the end of the trip, I got back home and realized how much I learned, about the world, about myself, about others and I cherished that feeling, hoping that finally I was on the path leading to my happiness.
Folamour’s ‘The Journey’ is out now. You can buy/stream it here. Be sure to keep up with him on Instagram to stay up to date on all of his latest projects. Check out our interview with him earlier this year here.
