We Speak Music
Myshkin’s Ruby Warblers Turn Up the Heat on ‘Hot Night in Paris’
If Hot Night in Paris proves anything, it’s that patience can swing.
Out now, the new album from Myshkin and her long-running outfit The Ruby Warblers is a vivid, brass-laced ride through styles, cities, and states of mind. It’s playful without being lightweight, sophisticated without losing grit, and above all, it sounds like a band fully alive to the moment.
The record wastes no time setting the tone. The Light bursts forward with a driving pulse before giving way to a series of sharp left turns: the eerie sway of Birds on the Line, the smoky tango of Peace, the crisp, dry snap of Cut Set Polished. Each track feels like a different corner of the same nocturnal landscape.
And then comes the parade.
Thanks to drummer Danny Frankel, whose credits include work with Lou Reed and k.d. lang, the album periodically slips into a second-line groove that feels lifted straight from a New Orleans street procession. It’s loose, celebratory, and just a little bit unruly, in the best way.
But what really makes Hot Night in Paris land is the interplay. This is not a solo record dressed up as a band project; it’s a conversation.
Bob Furgo’s violin lines weave through the arrangements like commentary, while Victoria Williams’ guzheng introduces textures that catch the ear off guard. The horns, trombone and sax, don’t just decorate; they push, tease, and occasionally steal the scene. Beneath it all, upright bass and rhythm guitar lock into a groove that keeps everything grounded.
At the center stands Myshkin herself, delivering each line with a storyteller’s instinct for timing and tone. Her voice, silky but edged with steel, carries songs that tackle big themes without losing their human scale: power, beauty, courage, redemption.
There’s also a sense of release here. Many of these tracks were longtime live favorites that never made it onto previous records. Captured at last in Joshua Tree, they arrive not as archival pieces but as fully realized performances, sharpened by years on stage.
The result is an album that feels both lived-in and immediate.
For an artist whose career has spanned New Orleans clubs, international festivals, multimedia experimentation, and a recent chapter in Scotland, Hot Night in Paris acts as a kind of creative snapshot, one that somehow captures movement itself.
It’s a late-night record, a road record, and a band-at-full-tilt record all at once.
And it swings.
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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