➔ CREDITS

Album produced by Marianne Dissard & Raphael Mann

Musicians:

    ► Marianne Dissard - vocals, samples 8
    ► Raphael Mann - vocals, electric & acoustic guitars, ukulele, piano, Clavinet, Realistic MG-1 synth, reed organ, bass guitar, drums, drum machine, percussion, glockenspiel, kalimba, sound effects & samples
    ► Naïm Amor - electric guitars 3, acoustic guitars 1
    ► Saylor Breckenridge - harmonica 8
    ► Vicki Brown - loops & violin 9
    ► Luke Doucet - electric guitar 8
    ► Claire Dugue - hurdy-gurdy 7
    ► Terry Edwards - tenor sax 2, tenor & baritone saxes 3, flute 1
    ► Connor Gallaher - electric guitars & 12-string acoustic 2; electric guitar 8
    ► Tom Hagerman - violas & violins on 5, 6, 7
    ► Thøger Lund - bass guitar 1, bass guitar & double bass 9, double bass
    ► Matt Mitchell - acoustic guitar 5
    ► Christian Ravaglioli - clavinet 8
    ► Matt Rendon - drums & vocals 2
    ► Marco Rosano - tin flute & trombone 9
    ► Bélen Ruiz- cellos 1, 5, 6
    ► Jon Villa - trumpets 8
    ► Arthur Vint - drums 8

Engineers:

Mixed by Raphael Mann except 9 mixed by Jim Waters at Waterworks Studio, Tucson, AZ

Each musician recorded their parts from their respective home studios except basic tracks for 2 recorded by Matt Rendon at Midtown Island, Tucson, AZ, and basic tracks for 8 recorded by Jim Waters at Waterworks, Tucson, AZ

Mastered by Bill Sellar at LOUD Mastering

String arrangements by Raphael Mann

Artwork and cassette design by Marianne Dissard from Raphael Mann's original artwork for 'Rappel'.

➔ STORY

‘Rappel*le’ compiles cover songs I recorded from January 2020 to January 2023. I always hoped these songs, released all along as singles, would ultimately amount to an album, my first album of covers, but it wasn’t until straggler ‘Happy Birthday’ that I felt I’d finally found the missing piece of 'my' tracklisting puzzle.

*Se rappeller* is French for to remember, and *un rappel* a product recall, a theatrical encore, or a vaccine booster whilst *descendre en rappel* is lowering oneself with a double rope coiled around the body from a vertical mountainside—and how vertiginous, these artists we covered!. I want to thank the songwriters whose work inspired us enough to want to mess with their creations (not that the dead would mind, on the contrary): Janis Ian, Steely Dan, Ritchie Valens, Carly Simon, Townes Van Zandt, Bobbie Gentry, War, Adriano Celentano, and Phil Ochs.

I am also beyond grateful to my collaborators and especially to Raphael Mann whose artistry equals only his patience, and whose rigorous and methodical approach to music-making ideally complements my own disheveled ways. This was truly our lockdown project, a labour of love, and although we didn't see each other IRL during the greater part of those three years, we literally squatted in each other’s head the whole time. We wouldn’t have been able to make this music otherwise.

‘Rappel*le’ is an odd name. Quite simply, it’s ‘hers’, the *elle* version of ‘Rappel’. The director’s cut. And ‘Rappel’? Raphael Mann, my main creative partner on a project that stretched over the first three years of the pandemic, released ‘Rappel’, his tracklisting of our songs, in April 2022 exclusively on his label Frizz Records. Raphael’s version contains all the tracks we recorded together (the producer’s cut!), whilst mine omits some, either because I wasn’t wholly in love with them or because they were radio edits and bonuses which, in my view, confused the album’s narrative.  

And as I see it, ‘Rappel*le’ is a journey, with a story arc—I was (still am!) a filmmaker before I started making music—and a fictional self-portrait.

‘She’, the central female character, is on a quest to understand what on earth it’s all been about. ‘She’ looks back at her teenage self (‘At Seventeen’); ponders the cold truths of marriage, middle age, and monogamy (‘Dirty Work’, ‘Happy Birthday’); still feels as much longing and desire as a teenage boy would (‘Come On, Let’s Go!). Ultimately, ‘She’ finds hope, hard-won wisdom, and maturity—and above all, love, the ‘other’, albeit with a question mark (‘If I Needed You’). But a dramatic turn of events derails this natural coming of (middle) age. ‘She’ slowly cracks (‘Refractions’, ‘Slippin’ Into Darkness’), subjected, as we’ve all been in recent years, to a barrage of distressing news soundbites (‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’) and to a powerful virus that dramatically reveals but can’t quite upend Business-as-Usual (‘The Scorpion Departs But Never Returns’).

As I said, that’s just one way of looking at these songs. We humans are wired to connect dots and you’ll make up your own tale re-arranging those songs and picking your favorites—tracklisting as exercises in self-portraiture, on our 1980s teenage cassette compilations as much as today our streaming playlists (also a Bandcamp feature now!).

Now go listen to ’Rappel*le’ and ‘Rappel’. They’re two completely different albums cut from the same cloth.