Mediavolo: Live at the Novomax

Filmed on October 26, 2024, at the Novomax in Quimper, France, Mediavolo’s intimate return to the stage brings songs separated by years into bodily proximity. Guitarist and band composer Jacques Henry, keyboardist Fabrice Duhamel, drummer Lionel Prigent, and bassist David Carquet give compositions that invite solitary absorption in the studio the immediacy of people listening to one another as they play. Older material absorbs the experience gathered since its creation, while songs from Away Within find unexpected ancestors among earlier recordings. Throughout, Géraldine Le Cocq’s voice inhabits the delicate interval between a character’s predicament and her own emotional knowledge, drawing nourishment from both. The concert begins where 2011’s Modern Cause begins, with “Dan,” though its position here gives the song a second threshold to cross. Its family estrangement grows from recognizable intimacies into an imagined future in which affection has become inaccessible to those who…