Lovers is the Paris-based Swedish vocalist Linda Oláh and French guitarist Giani Caserotto, who met at the Paris Conservatory in 2008, and musical sparks flew instantly. Oláh is a multifaceted musician, who shapes and transforms her voice using its entire spectrum; screams, breaths, vocal crackles, classical and jazz techniques. Caserotto works on the relationship between composition and improvisation, classical and popular music, and seeks to push the limits of the guitar, whether electric or acoustic.

Lettres d’amour is Lovers’ debut album, put together between 2016 and 2025 at the Elementstudion in Gothenburg and Studio Atelier 18 in Paris. The long process allowed the slow-cooking, free-improvised music to grow and mature into intimate, thoughtfully arranged songs. The ten songs borrow the format of pop songs, inspired by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and flirt with the centuries-old tradition of serenades. But the music-making process enriched and mutated these genre-defying, storytelling songs with exploratory improvisations and experimentation with real-time electronic processing, allowing supposedly contrasting and alien sounds to fall in love with each other.

Obviously, Lettres d’amour is a tribute to love, sensual and taxing, life-affirming and intangible, eternal and inexhaustible. The ten evocative and dreamy, atmospheric songs suggest a modern-day update to the legacy troubadours, accompanying their voices with a lute (or later, the guitar). The intricate, carefully layered arrangements allow these songs to exist in the liminal space between the celestial and the grounded. But these songs also introduce a chaotic, disorienting, and often, risk-taking and noisy, dissonant feel to the songs, as if the experienced Lovers – Oláh and Caserotto  – insist that love, with its myriad aspects, needs the courage, determination, and passion of an acrobat walking on a tightrope.

Eyal Hareuveni

Linda Olàh (vocals, electronics), Giani Caserotto (electric guitar)