After her eponymous debut as Pony del Sol (2013), Swiss musician Gael Kyriakidis carries on the change initiated with her single “L’Amour Argent” (2015) and goes further down the road of her poetic, agile songwriting-pop. A moving repertoire that finds Kyriakidis’ voice flying around in bold, tenuous aerobatic acts.
On her first album, she lent her voice to characters, stories and different languages, swirling between biting irony and more subtle gestures. Here comes the time of introspection and honesty. “Sauvagerie” sees Gael Kyriakidis issuing her fragilities, fears and hopes. The end of innocence? Maybe a little. But Pony del Sol manages to hold on naivety just enough to continue seeing the world with poetry, to “mettre de l’infinipartout / put infinity everywhere” (“Ma Maison”). A glance sometimes tender, sometimes more heartbreaking on things she now recounts exclusively in French; her own language, the one that offers full transparency.
“Sauvagerie” is a french reference to J. G. Ballard’s “Running Wild” which tells the hyper-surveillance of our lives. Far from a simple and bitter “things were better before”, the album is rather an invitation to inner calm, a beautiful escape to daydreaming and nature. When Kyriakidis sings ” Dehors c’est la guerre et toutest trop cher / It’s war outside and everything is too expensive” (“Ma Maison”), she rather strives to build a mental safe space and a shelter open to the world than asserts a firm criticism of our times.
Behind these subtle lyrics, ethereal and ghostly synthesizers creep into acoustic guitar arpeggios, an old saloon piano and roaring arpeggiators from which languid female choruses rise. Built on home-made demos, the 5 pieces of the EP were then refined with producer Christian Pahud (Bombers, Larytta, Honey For Petzi, etc.) in the course of 2018, lost in the 1001 synths gathered in his Lausanne studio. After several months of collaboration, where the songs had time to breathe and evolve smoothly, Christian Pahud also took care of recording and mixing.
