Ann O'Aro by Ann O'Aro

"A powerful album spreading a universal message" (Les Inrocks)

"A voice capable of assailing or caressing, a visceral writing, a musicality and an uncommon strength of interpretation. This is what could summarize the flayed blues of Ann O'aro from Reunion Island. Her first album [is] a true poetic manifesto of the intimate". (Pan African Music)

Ann O'aro loves everything that touches the movement of the body, the rhythms and the voice: "I come from martial arts and music, before choosing maloya to sing about intimate and taboo subjects". Her wild writing is impregnated with accidental languages or linguistic tics: a poetic fulmination connected to insular taboos and strong emotions, sexual violence, incest and love passion. As in Kap Kap, one of her songs written in the Creole of Reunion, her native island. A raw and scathing fonnkér that describes the embrace of an incestuous father, which embraces the madness and violence of a criminal impulse in all its banal savagery: "Amoin, marmay, bonom, lo lou, tousala ansanm, mi mor pour rash aou in kri, kan mêm sa pal amour / I the child, the man, the wolf, all at once, I die to wring a cry out of you, with claws, with tail, even if it is not a cry of love." And Ann's song springs forth. A song that plunges into reality and is not afraid of the shadows. "Ann O'aro", first eponymous album (Produced by Philippe Conrath) Cobalt / BUDA Musique

Ann O'Aro is from the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. She uses her music, poetry and dance to confront her troubled upbringing and transform her personal pain into a universal message of empowerment, underpinned by traditional Maloya rhythms