It is at these late parts of an earth year that we all tend to take stock of the time in our lives that has just transpired. I recently had a chance to spend a day with the memory and music of my great friend Geneviève, and used it to make this mix of some of my favourite music of hers. She was an amazing artist, and i thoroughly encourage you to spend some time with her music. A great way to enjoy it is by listening to her records whilst looking over the amazing drawings on her covers and reading the lyric sheets she would print in french with english translations on the album sleeves.
I also wrote these words about her:
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Geneviève was the best of friends and a truly inspiring artist.
She was always pushing forward with new ideas and wanted to make the world a better one however she could…She always wanted the best for others…and was so sensitive to the feelings and injustices of the world.
She was an excellent listener, and had an amazing ability to always be able to think of her friends and remember - with detail - the conversations she had with them in the past, which is what made her a great confidant and a formidable gift giver.
To be invited and welcomed back again & again into her and Phil’s home in Anacortes (with a lovingly made bed - as Dirk Kinsey said at her memorial, she made up THE BEST beds), and in-turn the local community, changed my life.
After living in the Anacortes community for 3 months in 2008 as an artist in residence, the town became my surrogate northern hemispherical home away from home, and Phil & Geneviève felt more like a family to me than just friends. And this made Geneviève closer to a sister, or surrogate mother…she probably would have made a joke here about being my long lost 11-year old kid brother, but i liked to think of her and remember her in the role she took on Sunday of HeckFest 2009 as ‘Reggae Mom.’ (insert Ingeborg’s photo here).
Geneviève made me feel like what i was doing with music was worth all the energy.
She was the greatest champion of me and inspired my artistic abilities. She seemingly knew that my confidence in this area was something i consistantly struggle with, and needed help from someone i admired, like her.
Next to my mother and my partner Tara, Geneviève is the the most generous woman i have ever known, which is why i feel like two of the strongest and most influential women in my life have left the earth in the last two years (note: my mother passed away in 2015).
I feel so grateful to have been invited and able to work with her on recording her amazing music. Everything she did in the studio seemed to come so effortlessly, but i think this was because she was always switched on in that creative way.
The ideas flowed through her, but she also had the ability that some possess to catalogue and archive the good ideas…honing and crafting them, imbuing them further with personal experiences and the right amount of emotional weight to refine the stronger stories into even stronger pieces of art through her drawings and music. I have what could be called a very rudimentary understanding of french, but can barely string a word together (she laughed at my attempts to even pronounce the songs’ titles), but Geneviève would always take some time to explain to me the lyrics of the song and the overall theme of a piece before or during the recording, so that the path towards the right tone and a finished song would be clear.
In the recording studio, her severe talents revealed themselves in her astonishingly powerful ‘first idea - best idea,’ and ‘one-take-wonder,’ ethos.
She would not have sung a word all day (apart from the hilarious little songs she constantly made up about snacking or setting up gear or going to the toilet), but would just sit writing and re-writing lyrics while i worked on balancing the instrumental parts which she had already pre-mapped out in her head and put down perfectly to tape earlier in the day…and then all of a sudden she would go out to a microphone in the studio and deliver the most spellbinding and perfect vocal take. I often found myself in tears in the control room whilst riding the preamp level, trying to dry my eyes before she re-entered the room to listen back.
It was in this way that Geneviève was also incredibly in touch with the darkness of all things.
Her music has the power to engage with the most base-level feelings of absolute pain and loss, and her sensitivity to these matters often leaves me emotionally wrecked. She was in contact with (and had a hotline to) the ghosts, spirits, and souls in all of nature to a degree that few people can be.
Her voice and spirit was itself an absolute force of nature, and at times commanded nature itself to react:
There was the time she was able to synchronise the lapping waters underneath the port authority warehouse into a part of her performance at What the Heck Fest in 2009, or the wind that she seemed to conjure up, as it howled through the open window of the Keystone building after her final vocal take for the song “Hors-Terre” (we left this on the track so you can hear it in the recording).
For me, the last time i heard Geneviève sing acoustically was at the Unknown studio in Anacortes, when we were recording Fleuve in late 2013 (released 2015). This was the location of her memorial service that Phil hosted the week after she died in July of 2016. I was too distraught and scattered to say anything that day, but i deeply had wanted to say something about how prominent her presence is in that space. I hear her voice in the reverb tail of every sound in that hall and she will always be with me in that way when i am in that place.
I am lucky to have this remembrance of her, but we are all SO lucky to have her voice and images in records & books to remind us of her creative gifts, but also of her great kindness and giving nature…it’s in everything she wrote & sang.
A few people said it at the memorial in July, but i believe it to be true that all who knew Geneviève now have a duty to at least try to live life in her spirit of giving, sensitivity and thoughtfulness…to do the best to make those around us feel welcome, wanted and loved…and to make up a good bed for a weary traveller.
We will all miss you dearly in this world, Geneviève, and look forward to meeting you again in the next.
Geneviève est partie, vive Geneviève!
- Gus Franklin (Port Fairy/Melbourne, Australia).
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