voyage de l'âme

I keep coming back to “Voyage de l’âme.”

It is one of those tracks that catches me immediately through its flow. The tempo is absolutely driving, but it is not aggressive. It keeps moving forward, with this very natural rhythm that takes you somewhere before you have had time to decide where you are going.

The words stay quite simple. The song does not need to make a huge demonstration of itself. It remains psychedelic, poetic, and theatrical, but it never becomes complicated just for the sake of being complicated.

The track comes from I Declare Nothing, the collaboration between Tess Parks and Anton Newcombe. The album was released on 29 June 2015 through A Recordings. It was recorded in Berlin, and you can feel that the record came from a real meeting rather than from two artists being placed next to each other.

It was their first album together. They made more music after it, but this first record has its own atmosphere. There is something about the beginning of the collaboration, the moment where their two languages found each other, that makes it feel like a real communion.

They are both under-rated geniuses, at least to me.

The collaboration is genuinely excellent. There is a real harmony between the two of them, even when they are not doing the same thing. Anton brings the arrangements, the structures, the loops, the psychedelic knowledge, and all the passion that comes with his work in The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Tess brings this voice that is very broken, very rock, very particular.

Her voice can be difficult to get into at first. It is not necessarily easy on the first listen. You have to get past the grain of it a little bit. But once you do, it becomes impossible to imagine the song without it.

The first thing that gets me is the movement of the song. It has this very particular flow, something that is both loose and extremely structured. You can feel the architecture, but it does not feel rigid. It moves like it is breathing.

The tempo is absolutely driving. It pulls you along, but it leaves enough room for you to move inside it. That is important to me. You are not just listening to a rhythm from the outside. Your body starts following it. The song takes you with it without having to push.

And then the title says a lot. “Voyage de l’âme” is exactly what the track feels like. It is an epic song, but not in a huge or spectacular way. It is enchanting. There is a psychedelic trip inside it, but also something almost angelic. You feel that you are supposed to let go a little bit.

You have to relax.

Not stop listening. Not disconnect completely. Just stop trying to control every part of it. The song becomes a kind of theatre of souls, or theatre of the mind. You let the music take you through the different rooms, through the voices and the arrangements, without needing to hold on to everything at the same time.

The video extends that feeling in a very beautiful way. The song came first, and the clip arrived later, in September 2015. But it feels like they understood the visual world that was already inside the track.

They filmed it in Père-Lachaise, in Paris. You see them in front of graves, walking through the different paths and alleys, surrounded by these exceptional tombs. The cemetery gives the song an actual route. It turns the voyage into something you can follow with your eyes.

There is a real communion in it.

Not only between Tess and Anton, but between the song, the clip, and the place. They are moving through the cemetery together, and the whole thing feels like a meeting with something older than them. Something quiet, theatrical, and a little unreal.

There is also a small Greek side hidden in the track. It stays latent, but it is powerful. Something in the words, in the music, and in the way the voices are placed. It feels a little like an old theatre, with a chorus moving somewhere behind the main scene. Not literally, but in the feeling of it. There is this kind of lyricism that makes the song feel bigger without making it heavier.

And even though the song is very structured, the textures remain very natural. Nothing feels overworked. The music keeps its air, its movement, and its roughness. That is probably why the psychedelic side never becomes decorative. It stays connected to the song.

That is where Anton’s arrangements are so strong. He does not just decorate the song. He gives it a direction. He knows how to make the repetition grow, how to keep a simple idea alive, how to take something small and let it become a whole atmosphere.

And Tess is completely essential to that. Her voice does not smooth anything out. It keeps the cracks visible. At the beginning, that grain might push you away. But if you stay with it, the voice becomes the centre of the whole thing. It is rough, but also very delicate. Rock, but also strangely fragile.

I think that is what makes the collaboration work so well. They do not cancel each other out. They make the differences useful. The voice, the arrangements, the words, and the tempo all move in the same direction.

That is why I keep seeing them as two under-rated geniuses. Not because they are trying to show how clever they are, but because they know how to let a simple idea become much larger. They do not need to force the moment. They understand the feeling and they let it happen.

The album itself is excellent, but “Voyage de l’âme” is the track I keep returning to. It has this very rare balance between something immediate and something mysterious. You understand the feeling quickly, but you do not finish discovering the space around it.

It is pure art for me. A beautiful structure, but a structure that still feels natural. A song that carries a message without explaining it too much. A clip that gives it a place, a cemetery, a path, a series of tombs, and all these movements between the two artists.

I do not want to talk too much about what came after. They made more music together, and that is another part of the story. For now, I prefer to stay with this first communion, this album, this track, and this feeling of being transported somewhere else.

You just have to let go.

The theatre of the soul is already open.