“One night I dreamed of two hands tattooed with the words ‘Pain’ (Bread) and ‘Noir’ (Black). They seemed threatening yet familiar.

In the morning, those two words were still there and I realized it was time for something new.”
For a handful of years and records, François-Régis personified the St. Augustine project. Now Pain-Noir continues to apply the high standards he brought to pastoral American folk, but in French.
Acoustic instruments played with silk gloves; casual keyboard arrangements gleaming like shooting stars; production like a fall of snow, enveloping the music in silence and sweetness.
Melodies spiraling ever upward. The delicate melancholy of a bossa-nova singer from Montana or the Sancy mountains of France, who has never seen the ocean. Influences remain – shimmering Neil Young, Grandaddy by the fire or Bertrand Belin as an example – but what we mainly hear is the unique, radiant voice of Pain-Noir.