When you ask an artist about their influences on music, you might expect them to talk about Nina Simone, Pink Floyd, or Beethoven. And while those things can be true, Dominique Fils-Aime’s number one influence is Mother Nature itself. Her songs are inspired by birds flapping their wings, the myth of the phoenix, or a gentle meeting by the river.
To sit in the presence of Dominique and her band was nothing short of witnessing a wonder of this miracle, Nature. Fils-Aime stacks harmonizing loops of her own vocals live while building songs with her pianist (David Osei-Afrifa), guitarist (Etienne Miousse), bassist (Danny Trudeau), and drummer (Harvey Bien-Aimée). In true Jazz fashion, her songs break down into live freestyle moments for each instrumentalist, to which she will turn her full body to face them and soak in the live moment they are creating.
The venue ‘Live at the Sun Rose’ is stunningly beautiful. It sits on the third floor of the Sun Rose hotel, with big bay windows that offer a sweeping view of the basin city lights below. The lighting concept is a soft amber, laterally imbued into the walls with elegant crystal sconces, and glowing lanterns at each table. Every seat in the house is a good one, and the sound design for the room is acoustically pleasant and never too loud.
The room is intimate, with only fifty or so seats in the place. The artists brushed past our table to get to the stage, so you get the feeling that you are right there with them. And Fils-Aime makes the space feel even more intimate with her words. She opened her show by telling us about her newest album, My World Is The Sun, as a gift for her mother to enjoy for many years to come. Fils-Aime spoke of the power of sound and vibration, and how minds and bodies in the room will synchronize to music when fully present. In that, the act of listening becomes active and transformative.
Paraphrasing something she said, “When we come into and leave this world, there is peace. And in the middle there is the full spectrum of human emotion. We would like to share this with you tonight, and hope you come away with empathy and more capacity for love in your hearts.”
When she steps into those layers of emotions, she brings us to great crescendos of radical acceptance with the full support of her band, turning it up to eleven, belting, “Fire, rain, down, on me.” She also finds the quiet moments, the bittersweet moments, the joyful moments. There is play, sincerity, and beauty in the way she commands the room. And in this light, we all feel the power of nature that she has conducted.
Which brings me back to the point about nature. Nature is robust, strong, and unyielding. Unlike society — the systems humans create outside of nature are feeble, and the power we assign them is illusory. Betting on automation, electronics, and the internet is placing trust where God never intended. This was made incredibly evident after her final song, when the seats were clearing and the Wi-FI for the venue went down.
Here was a full group of music enjoyers, riding high from the vibrational bubble created for us, held ransom by a cashless POS system that could not process their credit cards. Imagine some fifty people standing for some 45 minutes around the bar, waiting for their credit cards to be individually written on printed paper because the Wi-Fi failed.
Nature has no such bottlenecks.
And Dominique Fils-Aime’s voice channels that which is above the highest cloud and beneath the deepest sea.
To paraphrase another thing she said, “Love is a resource that will never run out.”
The Indy Review 