Ylang Ylang’s Will to Love suggests both a challenge and a determination simultaneously. What does it actually take to love? Amidst the inherent contradictions of the self and the world around us, how do we come back to the foundation of love? The songs on this album sit in that place of friction: stillness and action, fear and desire, poison and medicine, reluctance and momentum, the pull to protect and the pull to stay open. You can look at the process Catherine Debard undertook in recording Will to Love perhaps as a response in and of itself.

Alongside longtime collaborators Connor Bennett (saxophone & electronics) and Olivier Dumont (flute), the trio recorded the album in the strange, soft and pastoral beauty of Woburn, QC while in residence at Domaine des Lignes. Wind instruments recorded beside a lake, improvising with found rocks, recording a loon at 4am, cooking food outdoors, sitting by a fire, petting the dog. And amidst the landscape and music that was made, they found themselves right on the border between Canada and US, with the border cutting through nearby woods.

Under these conditions, Ylang Ylang’s restless ambient music takes shape. Lilting piano ballads that at times recall Fiona Apple, vocals and woodwinds swirling that harken to Brigitte Fontaine’s & Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Comme à la radio. Debard, the skilled arranger she is, sets all her vocal work in contrast to instrumental passages, letting the room fill with sound before she calls us back, with broken syllables and overlapping phrasings. A sap-like drip resembling the album’s artwork, we feel placed right on the border, observing how our bodies are pushed inside boundaries, while we effort to cast our love free of restraint, should we have the will to do so.