Breton producer QUINQUIS (aka Émilie Quinquis) releases a new album today – eor (meaning “anchor” in Breton) is out on vinyl, CD and digitally via Mute.
Watch the video for ‘Blaz an holen’ (meaning “the taste of salt”), a song about withdrawal from an addiction to a feeling. The track features Cerys Hafana’s harp playing, which ripples and bubbles like foam on the tide, before her vocals, in her native Welsh language, overlap Quinquis’, in Breton.
eor weaves together tales of mermaids, inspired by time spent sailing from her home island of Ushant to faraway places. The album features ‘Dec’h’, with its fabulous accompanying video directed by Vanessa Le Reste, a peek into what happened when a troupe of neon clad drag artists arrive on the island and transform one of its inhabitants, as well as ‘Inkanuko’ (featuring labelmate Desire Marea, in what must surely be the first track to feature both Zulu and Breton languages), and ‘Morwreg’.
Émilie lives on Ushant Island, a landmass of six square miles off the coast of Brittany. Having learnt to sail solo three years ago – a necessary act, she felt, to get home to the island and leave again on her terms – she kept going. She crossed the Irish Sea, circled the Scottish islands and Faroes, experienced the vulnerability and power of living in the elements. She kept imagining what could be in the waves around her, what visceral figures could have been forgotten by folklore, and how – with her instruments in tow – she could help bring these mermaid presences to the surface, hold them up for air.
The result is an album in which music provides succour among the shudders and swells. It shows QUINQUIS as an exceptional producer, and an extraordinary singer, musician and songwriter, creating tracks which ripple and flow, that torrent and break, full of propulsive visions and startling stories of the sea.
eor came to life through her modular synthesisers – “I love how electronic music can connect, or create a dialogue between my body and somebody else’s body. You can really go to unknown territories with its sounds, and make people wish to listen again to them, to try to understand them, like when you’re learning a language.” – and was co-produced alongside Gareth Jones (Sunroof, Depeche Mode, Liars, Einstürzende Neubauten).
eor sees the producer bringing stories that could exist in the seas around Brittany to life. Thinking of herself at night on the sea, and the shapes she saw in the water, she kept coming back to imagining mermaids in folklore, and wanted to reshape that figure for the 21st century. “I wanted to think about the essence of a mermaid – the desire to encounter beauty that makes you want to lose yourself completely, to discover someone so enchanting that you would follow her into the sea, even if that would kill you.”
“We don’t hear many stories about mermaids falling in love with mermaids, or sailors falling in love with sailors”, she says. “I wanted to access these feelings, and these stories in a way that felt powerful, that felt right for these times.”
eor plunges into the watery cores of who we are and who we were, and carries us, powerfully, within its currents. It finds pulsing new ways to express the presences and emotions we encounter as we sail through our lives’ raging seas. QUINQUIS shows brilliantly how music can anchor us when we’re longing for the past, and propelling ourselves into unknown futures, her energy moving us, guiding us, all together.
eor is out on vinyl, CD and digitally via Mute on 9 May 2025.
eor – tracklisting
- Inkanuko (feat. Desire Marea)
- The tumbling point
- Blaz an holen (feat. Cerys Hafana)
- Distro
- Dec’h
- Morwreg
- Peñseidi
- Aet on
eor was produced by Émilie Quinquis & Gareth Jones. The album was mixed by Gareth Jones at Strongroom, London, recorded on Ushant Island by Émilie Quinquis, and mastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road.
QUINQUIS LIVE
- 10 May – Crozon (FR), La Jetée
- 14 May – Paris (FR), Balades Sonores – instore
- 15 May – London (UK), Here at Outernet – w/ Patrick Wolf
- 16 May – Rennes (FR), Blindspot
- 17 May – Brest (FR), Dialogues Musiques
- 28 May – Paris (FR), La Trabendo – w/ Patrick Wolf
- 11 July – Huelgoat (FR), Théatre de Verdure
- 13 July – La Rochelle (FR), Les Francofolies
- 18 July – Carhaix (FR), Festival des Vieilles Charrues
- 5 Aug – Ile Callot – Soirees Transat
- 9 Aug – Paimpol (FR), Festival du Chant de Marin
