Angèle David-Guillou has been played on NTS shows including The Early Bird Show w/ Jack Rollo, with Thira, Thira first played on 5 July 2024.

In contrast to much of her oeuvre to date as Klima, Angèle’s debut album under her given name is a largely, if not exclusively, instrumental work, predominantly consisting of melodically opulent, emotionally compelling compositions for the grand piano (and, on three songs, a Wurlitzer electric piano), many of them emblazoned with vivid arrangements for strings, woodwind, musical saw and percussion.

Inspired by the direct, elemental melodies of French folk and the flamboyant arrangements of European and Latin American Baroque music, Kourouma is hallmarked by a purity of expression, its almost nakedly immediate melodic lines as unsullied and affecting as those of Harold Budd or even Bill Evans at his most reflective.

The album is named in tribute to feted Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma, and many of its dozen, exquisitely realised essays are inspired as much by literature, both European and African, as they are by musical precedents. While nodding, melodically and thematically, to the work of Anna Marly (Russian-born French composer of ‘Le Partisan’, as famously covered by Leonard Cohen), the hauntingly poignant title track, the album’s only orthodox vocal ‘song’, is that rarest of things, a subtle protest ballad, lamenting, as does the work of the titular author, a world in which child soldiers can still exist. Elsewhere, the lilting, delicately percussive ‘And the Grass Was Singing’ acknowledges the similarly titled Doris Lessing novel, while the impudent, almost Erik Satie-esque ‘L’Enfer C’est les Autres’ (‘Hell is other people’) is named after the renowned axiom of existentialist doyen, Jean-Paul Sartre.

There are other influences at play on Kourouma: the clear, mellifluous lines of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman’s Schulwerk (Music for Children) and the intertwining counterpoints and percussive patter of Moondog are consistent touchstones, while the aforementioned Baroque tradition (‘Kuril’, ‘And the Grass Was Singing’), a jazz-reverie-like quality (‘Accalmie’, ‘Ubari Sand Sea’), and even a scent of North African desert mystique (‘Anti-Atlas’) impact critically upon Kourouma, helping elevate it way beyond the perfunctory compass of so many so-called ‘post-classical’ albums.

Moreover, in these and other pieces – the brisk, instantly familiar yet somehow elusive ‘Hesperides’, the dreamily immersive ‘Contrescarpe II’, the almost deliriously pretty ‘Our Garden’ – Angèle David-Guillou has fashioned timeless, unerringly touching keyboard, chamber and vocal music with a rare, ineffable facility to bewitch, elevate and stir the soul.