Kyrie's direct yet otherworldly style seems like folk music from some isolated mountain or urban canyon. It will take you places you've never been" - Globe & Mail
Kyrie Kristmanson is a Canadian and French singer-songwriter and co-founder of the indie rock band Rah Rah. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario and grew up in England, Quebec, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan. She started composing as a young teenager and her first two self-released albums, The Kyrie K Groove and Pagan Love, were released in 2006 and 2008. College radios and the CBC promoted her albums and she toured extensively on the Canadian Folk Festival circuit. In 2007, she was awarded a Canadian Folk Music Award and in 2009 the Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award for her composition “Song X”. The same year, she was contacted by the French singer Emily Loizeau who invited Kyrie Kristmanson to play the opening acts of her Pays Sauvage tour.
The label NØ FØRMAT! / Universal France released Origin of Stars, which was a compilation of her self-released work with a few additional tracks. Kyrie Kristmanson relocated to Paris for the tour where she enrolled at La Sorbonne to study the lost melodies of the women troubadours of medieval France. Her melodic reconstructions became the source material for Modern Ruin, a song cycle arranged for the Voce string quartet by Clément Ducol and released by Naïve Records in 2015. After touring extensively with this repertoire, she collaborated with the French producer Saint Michel on her Lady Lightly album, inspired by the parallel worlds theory of quantum physics and recorded in an abandoned wing of the Versailles Castle. For the tour, she invited the French physicist Étienne Klein to open the show with an introduction to quantum physics.
Kyrie Kristmanson is also celebrated for her unique interpretations of the 19th century French composer Gabriel Fauré’s melodies. She participated on Sony Music France’s release Ici-Bas – the melodies of Gabriel Fauré and promoted the album throughout France and for the prestigious closing ceremony of the Avignon Festival. During the pandemic, she composed a song cycle called Floralia, which incorporated influences from the folk music community in which she grew up in Saskatchewan and her love of medieval French music. She is currently on tour with these songs in France and Canada.
In 2024, the French ministry of culture awarded Kyrie the Order of Arts and Letters for her unique ability to create a musical vocabulary infused by the folk traditions of her native Canada and the songwriting culture of medieval France. Kyrie’s compositions create a dialogue between worlds: an interstice where past and present combine to create a living vestige of a bygone time, half remembered and half dreamed.