It all started at a party FEMALE co-hosted two Septembers ago. With her beguiling, French-accented brand of breeziness, floral artist, and lifestyle/travel content creator Aude Giraud – a guest and long-time friend of the magazine – began sharing during a casual conversation about how she had been learning the guitar and was considering recording music. Unlike how most exchanges at parties turn out, Giraud, 36, stuck by her words.
Last month, the French-Indonesian who’s been based in Singapore since 2015 released her first single Oh Boy, a soothing if haunting folk ballad that reveals not just her delicate vocals, but also musical and songwriting prowess under the moniker Flanery.
As it turns out, the former broadcast journalist studied at a “very classic music institution” in Paris as a pre-teen where she specialised in the viola for years. (Her mother thought that her first choice for an instrument, the harp, was “too complicated” to have at home while the violin and guitar classes were full, she explains.)
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For the rest of this year, she will drop more tracks from her independent eponymous album that was produced by Singapore’s godfather of indie music, Leonard Soosay, and will be unveiled in its entirety by the end of 2021.
Mostly in English with bits of French woven in (like Ces Questions – described as “the most melancholic song of the album”), they alternate between pure acoustic ditties and more eclectic numbers livened up by the likes of dance-hall beats and EDM percussion inspired by the drums of traditional Chinese lion dances.
Singapore-based French floral artist Aude Giraud ushers in the new year with a new career as a folk-influenced singer-songwriter, a new home – a refurbished former beach house in the east – and a new baby.
Largely self-penned by Giraud during a period of pre-Covid, self-imposed isolation in a hilltop cabin in Gisborne, New Zealand (most famously the first city in the world to see the sun rise), they make a poetic, heartfelt medley that touches on anything from her emotions to her late grandfather. Viral Tiktok hits, these are not.
The newcomer artiste and soon-to-be first-time mother (she was in her third trimester at our photoshoot) delves deeper into the romance of making music for the soul.
Visit www.flanerymusic.com for more updates on Flanery
