10 000 (LP)

Emilie, Montreal-based singer-songwriter's first LP record, is entitled 10 000. Her songs are written with a vibrant, sensitive intellect; each is a world populated by the faces of fleeting passions. The extraordinary musical quality of these finely crafted pieces stems from another brilliant mind: Jesse Mac Cormack, Emilie's accomplice and producer since her late teens. For her LP, 10 000, Emilie wrote the lyrics and music, then fully constructed the songs with Jesse and her drummer Francis Ledoux. The record came into being upon a frigid February, in the sprawling house where Studio B-12 resides nestled in the woods of Valcourt. The 1969 dwelling by architect Jacques de Blois stands suspended in time. Sunlight pours through it's enormous windows, onto the retro-futuristic furnishings of rooms too numerous to count. In this eccentric venue, succumbing to one's vision becomes inevitable. Ogden sat in the basement, the drums and other instruments were set up in various other spaces, and meters upon meters of wiring snaked across the floors of uniquely shaped rooms. As with the Valcourt home, Emilie's immersive universe is made up of countless rooms, dissimilar yet housed under the same roof. Here, a folk-Art Nouveau ballad (Blame) beckons; there, a pop song pays tribute to the inaccessible (Ten Thousand, the deftly altered recollection of a biblical passage: "ten thousand talents that you'll never see").