Pr2b

P.R2B, the stage name of Pauline Rambeau de Baralon, brings French chanson steeped in cinema to the Élysée Montmartre, mixing finely crafted lyrics with electric flights of fancy.

P.R2B is the stage name of Pauline Rambeau de Baralon, French author, composer, performer and director, born in 1990 in Saint-Doulchard, in the Cher department. She grew up near Bourges, entered the municipal music school through the clarinet, then learned guitar and songwriting at secondary school. The daughter of a professional guitarist who died when she was a child, she has said in interviews that her aristocratic-sounding surname concealed a working-class paternal family.

Her path runs as much through the image as through sound. After taking film studies at the lycée in Nevers and a spell at the Cours Florent, she graduated from La Fémis in directing. Her graduation short, Bird's Lament, takes its title from a piece by Moondog and follows a clarinettist who discovers the composer in a record shop. This double training runs through her songs, written like scenes, in which spoken voice crosses with singing.

Her first EP, Des rêves, sets out a songwriting that moves between French chanson, hip-hop and echoes of the 1980s. The album Rayons Gamma then earned her broad critical acclaim, from Télérama to Libération by way of Le Parisien. She has since carried her music towards film, composing for Kamal Lazraq's Les Meutes and then for Amélie Bonnin's Partir un jour.

Onstage, she champions a repertoire held together by its lyrics, with a physical presence inherited from theatre and a lighting design that matters as much as the sound. This show at the Élysée Montmartre follows on from the Parisian dates that accompanied her records.