Biografie
The most enchanting seduction need involve only the slightest of gestures. The new album from Laura
López Castro shows this can be true for music as well. These are songs that charm like a wonderful smile or a flirtatious look and they play around your ears with all the gentle magic of a breeze in high summer.
The band was founded in 2003 in Stuttgart, Germany, when singer Laura López Castro and guitarist, composer and producer Don Philippe met for their first musical exchange. She, a vivacious acting student with Spanish parents and a weakness for Björk and Kyuss, and he a reserved urbane forty-something with French roots, co-founder of German hip-hop band Freundeskreis and owner of an exquisite collection of Jazz and Bossa Nova LPs.
At first the two found themselves re-interpreting Bossa Nova classics, fascinated by the way the Brazilian masters created their lightly worn melancholy. It is this mix of super-cooled elegance and blazing sensuality in Bossa Nova, but also the harmony of the music from the Spanish-speaking countries of South America, that Laura López Castro and Don Philippe were tracing at first. Before long, though, their music developed its own life. Pieces from João Gilberto, Tom Jobim or Atahualpa Yupanqui began to be replaced by their own compositions, and their sound enhanced with elements of Jazz, oriental or classical music. Laura took to singing more and more in Spanish, her mother tongue.
In 2005 they both moved to Berlin where they continued their musical essays, finding that Philippe’s kitchen had ideal acoustics for their meetings. Their first album Mi Libro Abierto appeared in spring 2006, establishing itself as a small milestone of soulful acoustic music.
The second album "Laura López Castro y Don Philippe inventan el ser feliz" published in autumn 2007 takes up the story where her first chimed out, although this time more confidence and many more little flourishes are audible. Most of the pieces are original compositions. But the repertoire also includes almost forgotten treasures of music history - songs dreamt up in the shady places of sunnier continents and now distilled by these two, down the essence of their original beauty.
Laura López Castro and Don Philippe have not only brought their own conception of happiness into the world, but also two albums of ageless songs that achieves the suspense of simultaneous melancholy and comfort. These songs, in their bittersweet beauty, do usher you to happiness.
Ane Hebeisen
translated by Gabriel Fawcett
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