Algoma
Montréal, Quebec, Canada | INDIE
Music
Press
Montrealer Christianne fluently doles out world music-inspired folk, made pungent with Middle Eastern, African and Latin flavours. Born and raised in Northern Ontario, her journeys through North Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, and South America have helped diversify her musical palate. Recently signed to Quebec label Nu-Jazz, she's preparing new material for a second release, projected for late 2010. Emphatic and mellifluous, Christianne's dramatic singing evokes a blend of Katie Melua and KT Tunstall. Emotions leak from her vocals and spill over like tears from clenched eyelids; the same can be said about her songwriting. In fact, listening to the entirety of her impressive first record is a privilege.
- Nereida Fernandes - Exclaim! Magazine
Montrealer Christianne fluently doles out world music-inspired folk, made pungent with Middle Eastern, African and Latin flavours. Born and raised in Northern Ontario, her journeys through North Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, and South America have helped diversify her musical palate. Recently signed to Quebec label Nu-Jazz, she's preparing new material for a second release, projected for late 2010. Emphatic and mellifluous, Christianne's dramatic singing evokes a blend of Katie Melua and KT Tunstall. Emotions leak from her vocals and spill over like tears from clenched eyelids; the same can be said about her songwriting. In fact, listening to the entirety of her impressive first record is a privilege.
- Nereida Fernandes - Exclaim! Magazine
Discography
Doomsday Lovers (2008)
Algoma (2012)
Photos
Bio
The word Algoma stems from the Algonquin suffix “goma” meaning spirit lake.
Algoma is also the name of a district in Northwestern Ontario, famous for the rugged scenery that inspired the artwork of Canada’s most celebrated artists, the Group of Seven. Algoma is a land steeped in invisible folklore, where tales of struggle and endurance can only be heard by those with ears tuned to the silence of its forests, and the violence of it’s freezing waters.
In his classic collection of stories published in 1936, Tales of an Empty Cabin, Grey Owl describes the men and women living in the Mississagi Forest Reserve, just north of the town of Blind River, as “hard-bitten bush-wakers, nurtured in hardship, with barbed, gritty humor and an unparalleled skill in profanity.” These men that took to the lakes and the rivers, alongside the black bears and the black flies, still light the forest fires of Canadian mythology with their shared songs of survival and glory.
Born in this very small town of Blind River, Christianne’s music explores the emotional landscape of an unbearably vast solitude. With a voice that barks and howls, and a message as honest as a hard days work, this collection of songs are postcards from a mesmerizing middle of nowhere, each yearning with a haunting nostalgia for a time when things were truly wild. Christianne now lives in Montréal, and Algoma is her second album.
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