Let’s keep going towards the light.
Let’s keep to ourselves and not care
Does it make you feel scared?
Does it make you wanna run away?
Paris nights can make beginnings feel like detonations, and for Federico Nessi, Be My Wife was precisely that: an eruption of art, memory, and obsession spilling into song. The alter-ego of the Paris-based creative director crystallizes two decades of image-making, performance, and unabashed devotion to music. Humour and heartbreak entwine here like a double helix: neither eclipsing the other, each vital to the whole. The project’s name folds together a Bowie favourite and a silent film by Max Linder, embracing paradox with a smirk; a homosexual man asking someone to “be my wife” carries wit and ache in equal measure. As Federico puts it: “Humour is an important aspect of this project. It is as important as painstaking, heartbreaking, emotional outpouring.”
To Deliver a Feeling presses against the heart’s raw nerves, each track refracting the blurred line between biography and invention. Only You, the project’s earliest composition, begins with a Platters-esque invocation before splintering in two: first, a ballad steeped in ache; then, a Krautrock invocation, voice reduced to mantra: “I’m only interested in Paradise.” Devotion here becomes both vow and vertigo, faith and fever.
Me Cuesta plays as love letter and break-up letter to Argentina, the homeland Federico insists he is “from” after years divided between the US and France. Displacement and the elusive promise of belonging dissolve into a fusion Federico calls “tropi-goth:” a seductive alloy of alternative reggaeton, minimal wave, and cumbia reverberations. A distorted guitar moans across the haze, carving currents of longing into the humid air. Me Cuesta becomes a meditation on transient identity, poised between confession and existential ambiguity.
Another Light offers its ache in plain words: “I called to tell you I’m sorry /I called to tell you I lied / about the way I was feeling / although I wore a smile with pride.” Behind the lyric’s weight, girl-group echoes of the Shangri-Las shimmer like ghosts, caught in a nightclub glow for Ecoute Cherie’s video.
The EP closes with Rushed Restrictions, the track most tethered to the dancefloor, Federico chanting, “I feel it all coming to a halt.” It’s both a curtain call and a premonition; a finale that reflects the ending of the cycle of dual EPs, The Restless Pursuit being released earlier this year, and the broader dread of a world teetering on collapse.
Listen to To Deliver A Feeling below and order the EP here.
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