CHANTAL ACDA BAND

CHANTAL ACDA BAND

10 years of “Let Your Hands Be My Guide”
How Chantal Acda discovered the other half of herself

‘It will be you / to know where you are going / flowers to grow instantly.’
That’s how Chantal Acda sang over a decade ago in Paris, back to back with Nils Frahm, two on a piano stool, each on a keyboard. Beneath the piano parts, Adam Wiltzie let a glow of organ and strings echo.

There is a clip of the concert at the Café de la danse on YouTube: Sleepingdog + Nils Frahm @ Paris. A reminder of who was there then on that February night in 2012. For Chantal Acda, it simultaneously marked a turning point.

At the time, Acda and Wiltzie formed the duo Sleepingdog. Until then, it had been a refrain in Acda’s musical life: playing in duo projects, with fantastic musicians. A week after the Paris concert, Nils Frahm and Gyda Valtysdottir asked to Skype for a while. Except half of a duo, who was she herself? It was time to release something under her own name, Frahm and Valtysdottir thought. No longer hide behind others, but seek vulnerability, the invitation read.

Not long after that, Chantal Acda left for Nils Frahm in Berlin. There, together with Gyda Valtysdottir, Peter Broderick and Shahzad Ismaily, she recorded her first album under her own name. That became “Let Your Hands Be My Guide.” Acda remembers the recording session as days full of passion, fun, devotion and depth: “My heart still makes a big jump when I think back on it. We recorded more than just an album there. For me, it was a new start. Those days have been defining for everything I’ve been privileged to create since then. I am unabatedly grateful for it.”

10 years later, Chantal Acda looks back on the days that led to Let Your Hands Be My Guide.
10 years in which she released different albums with different people, but always these albums were connected to that first record, that moment in Berlin.
10 years during which Acda feels supported by a loyal audience at home and abroad.
10 years during which she feels supported by programmers and journalists.

Now it is time to celebrate. Chantal Acda would like to do that with people who have been important over the past decade: “One knows exactly how surrender wins over everything else. The other has been a sounding board for years. Then another beautiful voice and a fantastic woman and musician with whom I have no problem finding depth. They are all close to my heart.”

“I want to make Let Your Hands Be My Guide live, dance, speak and sing again. Like an open hand or, like during that wonderful concert with Frahm in Paris: a flower that keeps on blooming. Together and with you.”

– Chantal Acda