EMAS Presents: Helen Gillet

Wednesday, July 19, 2023 from 7:30-9:00 PM

Join us for a night of live, experimental music with New Orleans-based artist Helen Gillet for this month’s EMAS Presents!

Helen Gillet is a singer-songwriter and surrealist-archeologist exploring synthesized sounds, texture, and rhythm using an acoustic cello. Born in Belgium and raised in Singapore from the ages of 2 to 11, Gillet routinely shuffled between the homelands of her Belgian father and American mother. Now based in new Orleans, Gillet works with musicians of multiple backgrounds, from avant-garde jazz, classical, pop and funk. As a product of New Orleans’ mixed culture and music, Gillet has developed her own polyglot style, defined by live looping, layering cello parts, and vocal lines. Rhythmic figures emerge with bowed or plucked ostinatos. Gillet explores a variety of rubbing and slapping the body of the cello, enhanced with melodies played or sung in her haunting alto. Her mixed musical vocabulary reflects her disparate travels– French chanson of the 1940s, Belgian folk tunes sung in Walloon, a mix of rock and punk from the likes of PJ Harvey and X-Ray Spex, and her own affecting originals, like audience favorite “Julien,” sung in a mix of French and English. Gillet’s solo performance is known for its enigmatic quality as she fabricates each song with innovative use of the cello and true mastery of live looping technology.