Jacquie Cotillard
Jacquie Cotillard is a composer and performer from Montevallo, AL, previously incarnated as a foolish blues singer, Berliner prostitute, and classical hack respectively— the caberet equivalent of a disinformation campaign by an Art State. Blending the psychological woes of the rich and powerful with a domestic fear of food lines, the sultry group-think auteur will bemuse any Party or occasion and lull the body politik.
The JC act is idea-heavy while danceable or hypnotic, unsettling or rapturous, whimsical or terrifying. The sound combines limited technology with compelling oration while boldly rejecting lo-fi and any modern accessories. Compositions are intuitive and chaotic, with trendy use of dissonance and audio tricks. Sounds like those experimental guys from before the internet. People are bemused and descriptions are unintelligible. Jacquie has appeared in venues across the southeast, including the late Eclipse Coffee and Books, Saturn, Workplay, The Soft Rock Bungalow, The Nick, Fork and Spoon Records, The Mouthhole, Coppertop, and been forgotten nowhere.
JC has released three music collections, (Sleepy Pilot and Scenic Favorites, Songbook Hypnoses, and iMyoUiNG), and two written collections (N+1: Exquisite Corpse Poems, and Re/Act). With three-dozen pieces unreleased and performed live in addition to extensive live improvisation, Cotillard has managed to carve out astonished followings in tiny, accumulating numbers while building up a dense repertoire of new-music, avant-garde songs, and free-jazz constructions in the language of glam-rock and surrealism.
Operator of the Earth Hotel
Living and working in the college town of Montevallo from yrs 2013-68 to 2015-70 (on the Atomic Calendar, with 1945 as year 0), she hosted artistic salons with live music for two years and founded the Montevallo Music Podcast to document goings-on in the small and active community. As part of this project, dozens of bands and live performances were preserved and curated for distribution.
During this time, the concept of the Earth Hotel as a creative philosophical experiment was formalized, and Cotillard opened the doors to collaborators and guests at the Montevallo space in 2015. The Earth Hotel Podcast has since served Birmingham and a growing global audience, producing dozens of interviews and carefully curated Art-Propaganda presentations which seek to inspire open experimentation in creativity and discourse.
Early work of the Birmingham-based EH continued the production of podcasts with external clients and partners. Under the form of The Earth Hotel Network, Cotillard helped create and produce half-a-dozen programs between 2016 and 2019 (Born with Catheters, Beers and Broads, Welcome to Monotonia, I Came Here for an Argument, Whose Turn Is It?).
“Hypnocracy” - an opera long in making
In the political vacuum between 2012 and 2015, the labor at the Montevallo house had produced a set of songs dealing in themes of control, coercion, and culpability, each taking place in the mindset of an individual at the brink of losing their grasp on a precarious situation. These songs became the bloody anchor of an opera called HYPNOCRACY: The Ballad of the Question, which remains in production. The unknowing, 2013 satire of a megalomaniac billionaire’s-son in government collapsing in anxiety over his guilt and responsibilities (“But It’s a Scam!”) or the shocking realization that passports are suddenly required at your local grocery store at the behest of armed clerks, (“We’re All in the Food Club”) became surreal and prophetic as the world swung into the post-2016 geopolitics of American decline and potential disintegration.
As a compromise and potential salve, Jacquie will release a collection of intimate, nostalgic performances of these songs as a preface to the operatic aspirations of the full work at some point in the future, after we have all almost forgotten.
”Jacquie Cotillard Sings Songs From Hypnocracy” promises to be the smash hit of the late-summer middle-Alabama baroque songwriter political satire experimental/avant-garde/newmusic/numusic/nuclear music scene in whatever post-disaster year it will be unvaulted and released.
Other Projects
Cotillard manages the motivational speaker Carl JR, who began public appearances in Birmingham in 2017 after an extended illness which kept him out of the spotlight for some time.
In 2017, Cotillard assisted three esteemed partners in founding Top Shelf Burlesque, a performance troupe which has since presented striptease, music, and vaudeville antics to the Birmingham area. Under the moniker Marla Brandy, she has appeared in TSB showcases since its inception and featured as a solo performer in both striptease and dance acts.
From 2016-2018, Jacquie provided Birmingham romantic scandal band the Dizzy with piano, vocals, and songstressness as was required. Their third incarnation produced the record “Wrapped in Plastic” in 2016, released by Earth Hotel Records-cum-N-Lobby Sounds.