To create her third album, Nouveau Langage, multi-disciplinary artist N Nao simply let things emerge on their own. A sonic jigsaw puzzle started to take shape through various residencies, from a solitary moment to a seminal collaborative spark. Naomie de Lorimier chose artistic impulse as her compass.
“I document everything, whether it’s in a journal, or with recordings,” she says. “That’s why, for me, there’s no clear moment when an album begins or ends.”
And even if Nouveau Langage and Pleine Lune were improvisations, they weren’t destined to remain as such. Yet sometimes, “it’s the first take that’s the right one,” the artist explains. In residence at Studio B12 thanks to REDA (Résidence en Exploration et Développement Artistique, a non-profit organization from Valcourt, Québec), N Nao focused on finding new sounds. “Before going there, I’d holed up in Baie-Saint-Paul for a few days with my tape recorder,” she says, “and I improvised loops on a cassette that my sound engineer Jean-Bruno Pinard and I used in the studio.”
N Nao doesn’t always immediately embrace the spontaneity of this hodge-podge of elements, but her team is there to collect the gems, the raw diamonds, and the happy accidents. “I’m trying to trust them more and more when they want to preserve ‘as-is’ stuff that I recorded in the spur of the moment,” she giggles.
N Nao was born of an extremely simple formula, comprised of her a capella voice and pedals to create sound loops. “It might seem bold to do a show without instruments, but it was perfectly natural to me,” she says.
A playfully curious nerd, N Nao has long been into push-buttons, machines, and new technologies. “But my natural curiosity also drove me towards other people,” she says, “and I eventually felt like working in a group, notably on L’eau et les rêves [in 2023].” With Nouveau Langage, w released in January of 2025, she feels she’s getting back to her roots: “It all starts with the voice. The shape of the songs is created by the looped voice. It’s very ‘me.’ I have greater confidence in myself as a producer and sound engineer. I’m lucky to have Jean-Bruno, and we’ve worked together for a very long time, but I still like arriving with a lot of fully produced material.”
The voice collage on Nouveau Langage is a meticulous endeavour, one that she’d worked on ahead of time. “It almost feels like I glued those sounds together with glue that came from my own hands,” she says playfully.
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the N Nao song “Corps”
Discussions on the trades of musician and creator are part of N Nao’s daily life. “My collabs and other people’s projects I’m involved in multiply the conversations I can have” she says, “because I work with people from the experimental side of things as much as with people who make mainstream music, and that’s how I realized we’re all in the same boat.”
Her feeling that it’s difficult to carry on making art is shared by her peers from all walks of life. “What I’m seeking in artistic relations is solidarity,” says N Nao. “I distance myself from this culture of contests and competitions. I want to focus on what truly matters. It’s not always healthy to look at what others are doing. The culture of contests is everywhere, and it often gives the impression that there’s only room for one person, when what’s truly beautiful is plurality.”
Having studied visual arts, she also explores other art forms, and she believes in all manners of de-segregating the notion of “industry.” By collaborating with other artists, such as Klô Pelgag, Laurence-Anne, and Lou-Adriane Cassidy, to name but a few, N Nao feels the presence of a ship that has no intention of sinking. “We’re all pulling each other up,” she says. “I think exchanges are always beneficial, and they’re the solution, at this point in time, to avoid falling prey to fear, and instead sublimating this negative energy to create beauty. Our job is to create beauty.”
But once this beauty exists, how do you disseminate it? For N Nao, these questions are renewable – they need to constantly be asked. She’s often wondered how it was before social media, since those platforms are now increasingly becoming less and less useful. “Word of mouth? Print media? Radio?” she asks. “It feels like a good idea to ask yourself, ‘If it all blows to smithereens, what will we be left with?’ Any time I can talk about my creations to a wide audience, I see that as a privilege, but I try to avoid being disappointed by the actual mechanism, because I do believe it needs to be re-engineered.”
Music, stage plays, cinema. N Nao will feed her art as long as she breathes. “My film Miroir has been selected for Festival Regard,” she says. “I think it’s a beautiful thing to let different mediums cross-communicate. I’ll be doing a concept for a dance project soon. I eat inter-disciplinary projects for breakfast, and I’ll make albums for as long as I live.”
The release party for Nouveau Langage will take place at Montréal’s Ausgang Plaza on March 27, 2025, where N Nao will have the opportunity to showcase her full artistic potential. “We’re going to exploit the album visuals to turn the place into dark, wet cave at nighttime,” she says. “I just can’t wait to sing, and let that vibration go where it needs to go.”