Carmen Jaci - Happy Child

A Closer Listen

Would you like a half-hour fun break?  Ask this of children, and they will always say yes.  Ask this of adults, and they will want to say yes, but more often sigh and return to whatever they were doing: papers, emails, stocks and other dull tasks.  Carmen Jaci is inviting us to take a half-hour fun break.

One can see Jaci’s world on the cover: a world of bright colors, geometries, portals and beads.  Every object and opening is an invitation to use one’s imagination.  The artist’s press photo is even more inviting: she is wearing what looks like a giant letter or pink rainbow and yes, this is an actual clothing item (we asked!).  She might not be able to hold a drink at the party, but that’s what friends are for.

The album begins with a quick bubble bath.  Have you ever taken a bubble bath while blowing bubbles from a plastic cup, or done the Coke and Mentos experiment there?  Jaci begins with a delighted yelp, followed by big chords, toy drums and animated bubbles.  There will be plenty of bubbles throughout the recording, along with other wet sounds, wrung from video games or a toybox.  There will be sighs, smiles and many mallet instruments.  Every once in a while, a guest instrument will drop by like a guest on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.  The songs resist most linear equations, because like Cyndi Lauper, they just want to have fun.  Sometimes they dance from micro-melody to micro-melody like a child switching from one song to another as she changes characters in her Fisher-Price play.  Other times they will retain their focus, as in “I See,” replete with clucks, plucks, and the line, “let’s see,” which pretty much sums up the curiosity of a child.

“Jeux d’eux” delves into harps and cymbals, then breaks down into lapping waves, followed by fat synth.  “oh ah eh ih ah oh” comes with a delightful background story about strawberry bubble gum and a friendly monster under the bed.  Other pieces invite the listener to invent and illustrate their own stories.  Looped and sampled onomatopoeias imitate newborn utterances, inviting listeners to experiment with the tongue and teeth.  The fun half-hour is over before we know it; we’ve played, yelped, run around, scrawled with crayons and chalk and gotten gum in our hair.  Now it’s time to return to whatever we were doing, reinvigorated, rejuvenated, revived.  (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

Forget a packet of Skittles — should you wish to taste the rainbow, you don’t need to look much further than the debut album from French-Canadian, Holland-based producer Carmen Jaci. On Happy Child, she sets out to recreate a childlike sense of constant exploration and wonder, an attitude all too easily lost in adulthood. Fear not, though: as hyperactive as it may be, Happy Child is no bubblegum hyperpop record, but a detailed sonic ecosystem as influenced by Stravinsky as it is Grimes, sprinkled throughout with hints of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Mira Calix, and musique concrète.

Happy Child’s eight tracks are the length of pop songs rather than electronic pieces, but these are largely instrumental compositions that jumble acoustic components (piano, flutes, violins) with playful synths and vocal samples. Percussion arrives via the careful piecing together of these sounds, rather than with live or programmed drums. Intro track 'Bubble Bath' and the following title track lay out the album’s modus operandi: to bombard the senses with delightfully different kinds of noises moving in all directions at once — electronic notes, snatches of phone ringtones, video game bloops, split-seconds of speech — a rush-hour of sound.

Luckily, any discombobulation is held together by a few things — there’s method to Jaci’s madness. Not only is the music itself a bright collage or pointillist composition of sounds, but so are the accompanying visuals. Imagine Aardman claymation, the work of Kandinsky, and the music video for Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 single 'Can You Forgive Her?', melted down together and reformed into a surreal day-glo dream world.

Repeated instruments also prevent the album from deflating like a bouncy castle, like the piano throughout 'Jeux d’eau'. On 'Danse lunaire', percussive vocal snippets — hesitant syllables, like a child grasping at speech for the first time — act as a guide through the music. Other tracks are bolstered by slightly more formal pop structures, from the tongue-clicking, candy-flossed I See, 'to oh ah eh ih ah oh', a track reminiscent of Charlotte Adigery and Bolis Pupul’s moreish 2021 single 'Haha': both use clipped vocal noises like brickwork throughout the song.

Happy Child is a short debut with the potential to extend in any direction: all-out pop, video game soundtrack, contemporary composition. And though spiky with varying sonic fragments, the album somehow maintains a play-dough pliancy. These tracks, meticulously arranged and polished yet light-hearted and free of pretension, serve as a strong introduction to Jaci’s artistic world, as she uses her formidable production skills to remind us that actually, sometimes, music only needs to be fun.

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