Fashion provocateur Michèle Lamy heads for the cosmos on new LAVASCAR album

Garden of Memory draws on industrial and organic influences.

LAVASCAR is a sound and music project by fashion icon and provocateur Michèle Lamy, multi-disciplinary artist Nico Vascellari and Lamy’s daughter – artist Scarlett Rouge.

Following the release of their debut album A Dream Deferred in 2017, which was inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem Montage Of A Dream Deferred, the trio have announced a new album called Garden Of Memory.

Drawing on the work of Lebanese-American poet, journalist and artist Etel Adnan, Garden Of Memory explores the tension between the organic and industrial, layering both Rouge and Lamy’s idiosyncratic delivery over Vascellari’s ambient and EBM-influenced electronics.

After Vascellari described the debut LP as “an evocation of Michèle Lamy sitting in a cave, surrounded by wild beasts ready to devour her”, Lamy says the new record has loftier concerns: “So far it seems like we are more in the cosmos… We are coming out of the hole!”

Lamy continues: “I like poetry, I don’t like when there is sentence that tells you everything, I like suggestion.” It was for this reason that Lamy was drawn to the 93-year-old Adnan – “a woman explaining what’s going on in life. We can say everything is political, this is especially important.”

It’s a sentiment that Scarlett Rouge echoes: “She wrote political poetry, and she is a journalist, so that’s why I think when Michèle discovered her there was an immediate sense that this is now what needs to be felt and said.”

LAVASCAR’s Garden of Memory is out now digitally and on vinyl via The Vinyl Factory. Click here to order a copy and see the artwork in more detail below.