Eat my Butterfly – Labalamer (EP)

After opening the Shika Shika label sampler Querencia, released this past summer, drummer and producer Elodie Suzanne—aka Dilo and, more recently, Eat My Butterfly—gets reunited with her native Réunion. It’s a moment that’s happy and also a bit haunted, a balmy musical postcard from the Indian Ocean. The four-song EP, supplemented with a pair of remixes, finds her applying her gentle and elegant downtempo touch to maloya, the “other” main local folk-music style of Réunion alongside the more commonly familiar séga. Expect nimble and poignant melodies, subtle yet surprising rhythmic gestures, and generous use of the pikér, an idiophone in the marimba family, and other site-specific instruments. Suzanne has also enlisted three Réunionese singers, each of whom, in the lovely local creole, brings additional character to their assigned track.