Here below, Mélanie Defize is no longer, killed in the attack on the Maelbeek metro station in Brussels on March 22, 2016. And yet her presence is still alive, her sweet impishness and her curiosity have inspired in us a musical journey that follows her special likes and our own, as though to surprise her one more time. Mélanie worked for the label Cypres from 2014. A passionate lover of ealy music, she was interested in the emergence of a vocal conception for female voices through the madrigals of Maddalena Casulana, the first Western female composer to have been published. This young baroque violinist of 29, musicologist and adept of music therapy, was ever an insatiable researcher who was preparing her university diploma in the history of medicine at Paris Descartes: in this Institute she was a musicologist among cardiologists, a woman among men. Open to all musical genres, attentive to both performers and composers, Mélanie gleaned with serious purpose from art, science and life. Mélanie's Ear is the first album of the collection Cypressentiel, the aim of which is to distil the label's indispensables, the albums for a desert island, the artistic box-sets and the unusual compilations. We dedicate it to her with the same joy that, we hope, she would have had in discovering it. Through this dedication we also pay homage to all the victims of ignorance and barbarity.