Lucian & Caroline, the new album from LA-based musician Sagittaire (a.k.a. Ivan Mairesse) depicts a fractured narrative about the unraveling of a passionate but dysfunctional romance. Based on the real life love affair of painter Lucian Freud and writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, the nine-song suite is an impressionistic, montage-like sequence set in London in the early 1950s. Contrasting a historical narrative arc with forward-looking experimentation – fusing elements of trip-hop, dub, and techno with orchestral flourishes – the album’s musical ebb and flow mirrors the artists’ dynamic.

“Lucian and Caroline were like a rock 'n' roll couple in a different milieu,” says Mairesse. “ I was drawn to the idea of crafting a collection of songs based around their chaotic creative partnership.”


Inspired by concept albums such as Lou Reed’s Berlin and Julia Holter’s Loud City Song, alongside the cut-up editing techniques of Nicolas Roeg’s 1980 film Bad Timing, the couple’s story is revealed through clues and fragments of experiences. The bouncing beat of opener “Confidence Man” inserts the listener in medias res, channeling Lucian’s duplicitous nature through rapped lyrics by Nd0. “I tried to include sonic ruptures and varying alterations of the human voice,” says Mairesse, describing how he merged his vocals with manipulations of both male and female narrators.


The vocoder emerging midway through “Hi, It’s Caroline” beams back to the early stages of the artists’ attraction, while the spoken word passage of “Shiny Hair” – performed by painter Jessica Dean Harrison – shares Caroline’s troubled perspective from the confines of a mental hospital. “There is a paradox here,” says Mairesse. “She was locked up and called ‘crazy’ while Lucian’s erratic behavior was given a pass and considered a natural extension of his ‘genius.’”


While recording the album at Panoramic House Studio, Mairesse and engineer Jeremy Harris (Devendra Banhart, Hand Habits, Sam Gendel) juxtaposed acoustic and electronic elements as a musical metaphor for the attraction of opposites. On “Strange Angel,” martial snares propel warped peals of laughter, with lyrics commenting on the aura of the celebrity couple. “We give them saint-like status and attention,” Mairesse explains, “even though they often lead these disreputable lives.” As his soft vocals rise in intensity, “Flower Drum Song” interrupts the ear-pleasing sound of chiming percussion with a damaged guitar solo. “We tend to be drawn to and turned on by a danger factor,” Mairesse continues. “The presence of an unknown and possibly harmful side to those we desire both frightens and attracts us.”


With its collision of influences and genre-blurring approaches, each of the album’s nine songs enter a singular sound world, tied together by frayed narrative threads. On “Orchestral Piece,” the gradual distortion of violins and violas represent the beginning of the couple’s disintegration. The ominous synth arpeggios and sawing strings of “What We Do With Our Evenings” continue to highlight the cracks growing between Lucian and Caroline. Reaching a climactic state of tension, this song renders a breaking point in the record’s mid-section. The album concludes with its bittersweet title track, counterbalancing a final uplifting melody with dissonant, droning organs and guitars.


“Lucian and Caroline’s union was caustic,” Mairesse concludes, “yet there was an electricity created between them that kept pulling them back together, at least for a period.”

-Jesse Locke, 2023