Elle Barbara is an avant-garde singer-songwriter, recording artist, and performer based in Montreal, Quebec. Her music alternately combines elements of sophisti-pop, jazz, and glam, with an interest in library music and psychedelic soul. She has become an iconic and ubiquitous presence in Montreal, as comfortable at the DIY art show as she is performing with Madonna.
Rising from artist-run spaces at the turn of the 2010s, Elle Barbara has seen her work soar to enduring albeit niche acclaim, in a part-time artistic career whose highlights include duets with Lætitia Sadier and Sean Nicholas Savage. In the later half of the 2010s, Elle Barbara’s efforts mostly centered around community organizing and solidarity work. She notably helped establish an anti-poverty grassroots collective whose mission was to grant discretionary funds to low-income trans feminine people, and did peer work to promote harm reduction methods and offer active listening and legal support to society’s most vulnerable. She mainly releases music as Elle Barbara’s Black Space, a concept group she formed to feel less culturally isolated in Montreal’s underground. She is also partly responsible for reviving Montreal’s ballroom scene.
Today, Elle is announcing her American debut, Word On The Street, which will be out June 27th on Celluloid Lunch, K Records / Perennial / K and Elle’s own House of Barbara. To mark the announce, Elle is sharing the single and video for her track “Hitler, Satan & Associates LLP.”
Word on Street was written, composed, arranged, and produced by Elle Barbara, in close collaboration with Renny Wilson, who recorded, engineered, and mixed the album over a challenging 8-year arc that saw Elle transition socially and medically while on welfare and frequently eating off as little as $11 CAD per week. In that sense, Word on the Street is a victory against class struggle and nepotism, and is a brazen testament to how a low-income, welfare-assisted, middle-aged, Black male-to-female transsexual beat the odds, using all resources to make the music of her mind while ignoring music industry conventions.
The albums is a genre-defying concept album that promises to become a cult classic and solidify Elle Barbara’s reputation as an uncompromising auteur, champion of queer eccentricity, all-around visionary, and working-class heroine.
Each track on the album conjures up unique pictures composed of seemingly incongruous images such as corrupt justice systems, aliens, industrial food production, religious fanaticism, and the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.
As such, “Hitler, Satan and Associates LLP” makes an excellent introduction to the album, as Elle explains:
“Hitler, Satan & Associates LLP is a psychedelic avant-pop number with elements of free jazz. The lyrics are about as absurd as the economic times we live in.”
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media.]
