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He was born in the medieval city of Provins in 1968 before setting sail for elsewhere and even, a nomad at heart, several…
As a teenager, he moved to Nantes. While claiming a rock approach, often barely audible, he made a point of honor to chisel texts as dreamlike as they were poetic. After a first self-produced attempt that went rather unnoticed, he signed to the Nantes label Lithium for a first official album entitled “La Fossette”. In 2022, almost three decades later, he released his most accomplished collection with “Le monde réel.
For his 56th birthday, I decided to dig up from my archives a review of his ambitious double album “La mémoire neuve” which was co-produced in Belgium by Gilles Martin. The voice of Françoiz Breut (who has since taken up residence in Brussels) works wonders, particularly on “Les hauts quartiers de peine”. To this day, thanks in part to “Le Twente-Two bar”, this album remains Dominique A’s greatest commercial success to date. Follow me in the time machine with this article published in June 1995 in the columns of a Belgian daily newspaper.
“He is content with a potentially hermaphroditic first name and a single letter (the first of the alphabet all the same) to exist artistically. Leaving his Brittany, Dominique A stopped off in Belgium in a two-room apartment in Saint Gilles to record “La mémoire neuve” with the sound engineer Gilles Martin. A quick detour before probably joining the attractive City of Lights, Dominique put down his favorite records, his acoustic guitar and his Yamaha in the middle of the trams that make the Barrière tremble. Fundamentally stateless and deeply sincere, this unconditional admirer of Brel does not spare an adopted city to which he devotes only a passion of necessity, that of sheltering under a roof to immerse himself in the first recordings of the late Polyphonic Size, a legendary Brussels group of intellectual and tiny electronic pop. Abandoning the frail skiff of “La fossette”, a fragile collection of refrains boned, Dominique A. rubs shoulders with real instruments that dare, sometimes, to make a little noise (“Va bene”). Melancholic, Dominique A revives the embers of a realism dear to Edith Piaf as to Daniel Darc.”
(AK – Photo: Music Belgium Photos)
Photo: Dominique A on stage at the Festival des Libertés at the Théâtre National in Brussels (Belgium) on October 16, 2023 (© Music Belgium Photos)
