His voice stands out from all the others against flamenco guitars, a string orchestra, a Genoese choir, stampeding ska, and echoes of Eastern music, rock and Mediterranean meditations. Nilda Fernandez is back, ten years after his last French album, Mes hommages, in which he honoured his elders, from Léo Ferré to Michel Polnareff.

Following a few years in Russia, where he found unexpected stardom singing French songs, and then all kinds of artistic adventures in places as far removed as Cuba and the suburbs of Paris, as well as a flamenco production of Carmen and stage performances with Adamo, Georges Moustaki, Lara Fabian, Mouss and Hakim, and the soprano Sylvie Brunet, he has recorded an album in Genoa and Paris and entitled it simply Nilda Fernandez.

RFI Musique: Why did you choose to record in Genoa and then Paris?
Nilda Fernandez: I was looking for a place to create the record, a bit like a woman deciding where to give birth. I wanted to record in a place whose outside appearance inspired me – which is something I couldn’t find in a hard, urban city like Moscow. Alan Simon had told me about a studio in Genoa, la Case Della Musica, and I went to see it after a concert in Switzerland. And the place is perfect. When I leave the studio, I can see the port. Genoa hasn’t been done up there, you can still feel its past. Because there are no cars in that part of town, it’s like a hilly Venice.

Did you stop long in Genoa?
Five months, four of them in the studio. We stuck to office hours and I only worked with Italian musicians, except for the two accordionists Marcel Azzola and Lionel Suarez, who came to Paris. I live in the Porte de Clignancourt area of Paris, right near the CBE studio, which is legendary for its pop music. I recorded all the voices using the same microphones and console as Joe Dassin, Claude François and Gérard Manset. I needed to be in France for the singing so that everyone in the studio could understand my lyrics and give me feedback on the songs’ expression and meaning.

A lot of today’s artists have also turned director or producer, and are experts in Pro Tools and computers. What about you?

I have got Pro Tools, but when I’m working on a record, I don’t go home at night and listen to what I did during the day. I’d feel like a painter correcting a picture to match the photos he’d taken of it.

Some of the songs on the album are about separation. Were they about what was going on in your life when you wrote them?
You don’t make conscious, premeditated decisions on the themes of an album. It can take ten years to write, with a few more contemporary songs – but I couldn’t even say which are which any more. It doesn’t feel particularly natural to freeze frame music and make an album of it, especially after seven years of singing all over the place and trying out all kinds of experiences. When you’re doing that, an album is way, way off in the distance. But even if I have an easy-going approach to doing an album, it’s an extremely important, serious act. I don’t like it when I hear artists say they’ve produced a disc because they owed their record label another album. A recording lasts a lifetime. 

You yourself have described your career path as "chance-based". But is it an organised chance?
For me, chaos is the organisation of the universe. It’s an organisation we’ve been trying to describe for centuries, but will we ever understand it? Chaos is important. I don’t mind if people consider my life to be chaotic. Inside, I know how it all adds up. For example, in the record I include the sound of a Moscow subway door closing. When I was a child, the Barcelona underground was Soviet-made and, uncannily, the Russian subway makes exactly the same noise.
Which are the most reproduced two statues in the world? There’s Christopher Columbus pointing towards the ocean, which used to fascinate me in Barcelona, and the classic statue of Lenin in the same posture, pointing towards the future. In my travels I’ve been unintentionally following Columbus, in Genoa and Saint-Domingue, and in deepest Russia you keep coming across Lenin’s statue. Can we call that "organised"? 

Do your professional decisions follow the same logic of controlled chance?
I went to Moscow and met a singer there who said he wanted to do something with me – and ended up spending five years in Russia. And I had to convince the record label I was under contract with that I wasn’t going to do an album because I was on something else. They had lost money because some star had messed up and they really wanted me to do a record straight away. But I was inspired by my life in Russia and they couldn’t understand that I was going to produce a better album as a result of it. I’m pretty much a renegade. I am always breaking things off. It’s almost a principle. When you belong to a clan or a family, you exclude yourself from all the other clans and families. Sometimes, even one single person is enough to make a clan and try to shut you in. That makes me a renegade.