Skeem

The Skeem project was born at the end of the nineties when French musician and composer Serge Barbaro told his graphic designer Mark Eaton he was looking for a lyricist to work on an album. Mark said that he was up for the challenge.

Several pieces were written in a progressive rock-oriented style, and this collaboration led in 2001 to the eponymous SKEEM album.

For the recording of this album, Serge (guitar, keyboards, and vocals) worked with EmmaM (drums), Bertrand Hulin Bertaud (bass), Berny Barbaro (keyboards and sound mixing), Fabrice Rives (keyboards), Sabrina Bendjema (guitar and backing vocals), and Cathy Lully Croux (backing vocals). Being members of the band Priam, EmmaM and Bertrand were not totally unknown in the progressive rock world.
Skeem were finally signed and distributed by Muséa.
Serge has been involved in numerous local projects as a composer, musician or arranger, including the MSA Project album release in 2011.

In the meantime, many new titles were written, some in collaboration with a new lyricist, Alex S Garcia.

Late 2008 Serge decided to go back into the studio to record a new Skeem album, not knowing that it would take almost 5 years to complete the project.
The new team was Joe Massot (drums), Jonathan Lattore (bass), Berny Barbaro (keyboards, arrangements, and sound), Pierre Teodori (acoustic guitars, violins, fretless bass), Serge Bianne (Bass), and Jessica Passarin, Oreema, John Cobalt, Framy and Serge on backing vocals.

“Just suggesting” was released in October 2013 and is also distributed by Musea.

Serge had this to say: “On this new record, I wanted to explore new directions. We had one-man (!) real string sections on “Half a life” and “The end complete”, and, thanks to Berny, we added orchestral arrangements to many songs, as you can hear for instance in the intro of “The hidden path”.
We also recorded a lot of backing vocal tracks to add new colours to the songs; check out “Last Days”!