Punk Moon is the fourth duo album of French vocalist-composer Claudia Solal and pianist-composer Benjamin Moussay that has been working for more than twenty years now, offering intimate and sensual genre-defying songs, now sung in English (Solal’s mother tongue). The album was recorded at Studio Sextan in Malakoff in the end of November and beginning of December 2024.

Solal (who has another duo with fellow French, innovative pianist-composer Benoît Delbecq) composed ten hallucinatory, story-like songs with suggestive titles («Battle Dress», «Swollen River», the multi-track voices of «Slow War» and the dreamy title song, that corresponds with Nick Drake’s dreamy delivery of his iconic «Pink Moon»), articulated in commanding, warm and emotional voice, but with abundant silences, and speak and question our current world’s situation, the passionate flesh, the surrender of our bodies to love like so many lost ships, and the struggles one must wage to build oneself, or to emancipate oneself. Philippe Ochem, the director of Jazzdor, describes these songs as sketching a journey about life, its restlessness, or of the distance one needs to go through to leave a mark.

Moussay, with delicate piano preparations and subtle modular synth sounds, orchestrates Solal’s suggestive, often dreamy phrasing as well as the tender moods of the songs with introspective restraint, but also with flowing imagination. His playing has strong roots in jazz but allows these songs to float seamlessly and organically between genres. Solal and Moussay know each other sonic aesthetics inside out, and their reserved yet telepathic dynamics complement each other and create a whole greater than its parts.

Eyal Hareuveni

Claudia Solal (vocals), Benjamin Moussay (piano, synthesizers)