In his latest survey of the French music scene, David McKenna takes stock of a tumultuous few months in French politics, picks some recent cultural highlights and reviews culture-straddling music from Marseille as well as new folk, occult rock and an adventurous gamelan ensemble
For avid France-watchers, there’s been a lot to process since the last Rockfort column in June, musically and otherwise. A little over four years ago, I wrote about how ‘centrist’ Emmanuel Macron and the French government were behaving in ways that were emboldening the far right, and which were also very right-wing in themselves. So, sadly, and as much as Macron’s electoral gamble was a shock, it wasn’t a surprise to see how close the 2024 legislative elections came to producing a far right government. More unexpected, and far more welcome, was the effective evasive action taken by the French left, which managed to organise quickly and stave off disaster. This may well prove to be a temporary reprieve, with Macron’s trashing of democratic norms since the election demonstrating that, in his blind arrogance, he has learned absolutely nothing and may yet deliver France into the arms of fascists. But it was also heartening to see initiatives emerging spontaneously from the French music sector, particularly at more underground and grassroots levels, coming from rap artists (20 of whom featured on nearly 10-minute track ‘No Pasarán), the Front Des Musiques Indépendantes, who used the En Lutte! compilations to raise money and awareness, concerted action from members of the SMA – Syndicat des Musiques Actuelles (a union representing around 600 actors in the music sector) and the Folk Contre Le Fascism initiative. The statement from folk musicians, labels and other organisations was particularly notable for its rejection of “the ideologies of cultural purity that too often hide the unacknowledged and revolting fantasy of racial purity. We know… that our music and our dances… are very much alive and draw their strength from the continual influx of various cultural currents.”
Hot on the heels of the elections came the Olympics, and an opening ceremony that featured Aya Nakamura (not a household name in the UK, but a global superstar), metal band Gojira’s spirit-of-1789 performance and provocative chansonnier Philippe Katerine daubed in blue to represent Dionysus, a performance that some at least pretended to interpret as blasphemous. I tend to find Katerine’s latter-day cosmic jester persona grating more than anything, but there’s no denying that his intervention in the Olympics and the subsequent interviews given to bemused foreign reporters were terrific fun.
Aside from the music reviewed below, cultural highlights have included a first-time visit, in late August, to the Baignade Sauvage festival in the Tarn valley in southern France. It’s situated in a stunning small town called Ambialet, tucked into a meander in the Tarn river. Alongside international artists like Lia Kohl and El Khat, French acts included Roxane Métayer, Julien Chamla (Aquaserge’s drummer), the gothic noise-folk of Le Diable Dégoutant, who played in a long, disused tunnel, folk duo Garenne (part of the La Crue collective, who played a stunning, Sunday-morning set in a small church, percussionist Charles Dubois, whose hilltop concert was arrived at via a Via Crucis (it’s a region steeped in Catholicism), Rachel Langlais’ prepared piano trio Dothe, PoiL Ueda – in imperious form – and Parasite Jazz, who played in a woodland clearing with their backs to the river and were applauded by passing paddleboarders. A violent summer storm on the Saturday night required a move indoors to a community hall to catch the powerful Ravage, a trio whose post rock sound features two violinists – one of whom handled his fiddle like he was throttling a chicken – and drummer Anthony Laguerre. As the festival’s name suggests – Baignade Sauvage roughly translates as ‘wild bath’ – you can swim in the river too.
Finally, one of the best music documentaries of the year arrived in the form of Franco-German channel Arte’s six-episode series DJ Mehdi: Made In France. Mehdi, who died in an accident at home when he was only 34, is perhaps best known over here for his work in the latter half of his career when he was part of the Ed Banger label crew, but prior to that he had already established himself as one of France’s pre-eminent rap beatmakers/producers, having made his name with the group Ideal J. The beauty of Made in France is the wealth of detail and depth that its luxurious running time affords. It becomes a portrait not just of the prodigiously talented Mehdi himself but also a whole period of French socio-cultural history, the emergence of rap and electronic dance music as key genres in the French musical landscape, and the complex, hot-and-cold relationship between the two.
Other musical highpoints are included in the review below and in the latest Rockfort mix, which also includes a taster of the forthcoming Foudre! album (featuring Paul Régimbeau – see Grive, below), a selection from a superb album I missed before the summer by Paris-based Violence Gratuite and exploratory organ work from Variéras.
MIDGET! Qui parle ombre by Midget!
I think ‘Premier Soleil’, the opening track from Midget!’s last album Ferme Tes Jolis Cieux, might be one of the most beautiful songs of past ten years. British composer Gavin Bryars is another fan of the song, so much so that he ended up collaborating with the group over a series of concerts that featured a hugely expanded line-up (with Ensemble 0 and vocal group Macadam Ensemble) and Bryars’ arrangements. Some of those were of material that appears on Qui Parle Ombre, but the album itself is shorn of Bryar’s contributions. No matter. It does find the duo of Mocke and Claire Vailler teaming up with electronic producer AtomTM, who worked on several albums by Mocke’s old band Holden, and delivering another sensational set of cosmic chanson.
The title of the brief and beguiling first track, ‘La Porte S’Ouvre’ (The Door Opens), suggests that we’re about to cross a threshold into another reality, and it glides into ‘Qui Parle Ombre’, a kaleidoscopic songscape that feels analogous to the mysterious, multi-coloured blob on the album cover; the sound swishes and swooshes around the stereo field, Vailler’s soaring vocal, sometimes hovering above a bed of cooing, multitracked harmonies, is hair-raising in its purity of tone and controlled intensity. It feels like being serenaded by the aurora borealis. The rest of the album intersperses longer pieces like ‘Transfiguration’ – a richly ornamented fantasia, with flute and bassoon augmenting Mocke’s spidery guitar and Vailler’s lush keyboards – with miniatures including 40-second guitar piece ‘Deux Êtres’. But every song seems to be bathed in the same mysterious, wintry light. Qui Parle Ombre is consistently graceful, and its peaks are sublime.
Dounia دنيا by Caïn و Muchi
This is a striking debut from the Franco-Moroccan duo of Sinclair Ringenbach and Vanda Forte on Marseille-based “Mediterranean” label Gros:Œuvre. Marseille, France’s oldest city and an ancient trading port, has always had close links with the Middle East and North Africa, acting as a gateway between France and Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and it’s still a hub for migrants from the Maghreb. Gros:Œuvre has embraced its location on the porous boundary between East and West, working with several acts of mixed heritage who combine sounds from around the Mediterranean basin: “cyber-chaabi” producer Syqlone, Kabylie Minogue’s Arabic-accented acid house and Caïn و Muchi. Dounia دنياcomes on the heels of a handful of excellent singles and EPs that fused various bass music styles (frequently throbbing dubstep but also grime and, on early track ‘Martyr’, drum & bass) trap and industrial techno with North African/Middle Eastern scales and Vanda Forte’s heavily processed vocals, which can be plaintive, assertive or coolly detached and are delivered in various Arabic dialects. The album pursues the same dark and spacious sound design, fusing carefully sculpted metallic noise, subterranean bass and sinuous melodies to scintillating effect.
Brama by Brama
Given that Brama feature a hurdy-gurdy player and sing in Occitan, you might expect this to be another of the drone-folk projects that feature regularly in this column. But Brama is a very different animal, a rollicking power trio fusing folk with 70s hard rock, psych, krautrock (cf the motoric-inspired opener ‘Somnhar’) and luminous three-part harmonies. Hurdy-gurdy is still used to drive the trancey energy but there are few slow-building drones here; tracks like ‘La Bruma’ burst out of the speakers with such joyous intensity that you can’t help but be swept up in it. ‘Senraija’ does have a gorgeous, misty dawn of an intro that temporarily moves the album into straighter folk territory, but the calm is eventually broken by a stinging riff before the band take off again at full clip. They remind me of Mdou Moctar in the way that they revitalise hoary rock tropes through a combination of local flair, blistering musicianship and infectious enthusiasm.
Ritual Tones by Alan Regardin
No Tongues are one of my favourite jazz-not-jazz groups in France, and in this, and the entry below, we have two members of the band branching out in fascinating ways. Trumpet player Alan Regardin’s Ritual Tones is a single contemporary/drone piece for trombone, flugelhorn, sax and positive organ – a type of small, easily-tuned pipe organ – spread over three movements. ‘Tones’ is 17 minutes of layered, gradually shifting… tones that gently merge and clash, finally resolving in a drawn-out organ chord; the shorter ‘Prelude’ massages your ribcage with a profound bass drone while brass lines gleam and glower; and ‘Ritual’ builds in more defined changes to being the piece to a poignant conclusion. Deeply immersive and impressive.
La Démesure du Pas by Matthieu Prual, Carol Robinson, Toma Gouband, Gabriel Lemaire, Joris Rühl
Matthieu Prual’s La Démesure Du Pasproject finds him enlisting a troupe of other musicians for some improv on the move. Having embarked on a ‘walking concert’ project in 2021, last year he decided to record several itinerant sessions, moving through a variety of locations – rural and coastal spots, and a submarine base in St Nazaire – responding to and interacting with the sounds around them: birds and running water, passing cars, stones. It manages to be both restful and delightfully playful; ‘Double Flûte’ matches flutes to splashed water as percussion, and ‘Marche Fictive’ captures cries and peals of sax in an echoing, hilly landscape.
LUX by Aluk Todolo
Aluk Todolo are another act with members who have been pursuing their individual projects of late, with guitarist Shantidas Reidacker putting out an album of crepuscular, ambient/post rock and bassist Matthieu Canaguier aka Inselberg taking a drone folk route. But they’ve returned to the mothership, and drummer Antoine Hadjioannou, for another towering, and typically cryptic, follow-up to 2016’s stupendous Voix: all the titles are a combination of small and large dots. The instrumental trio exist on the fringes of black metal, having emerged from bands in the scene, but are as informed by Ash Ra Tempel and Amon Düül II, as well as the deranged gothic prog of Italians Jacula. They refer to themselves as occult rock, so I’ll stick to that. They don’t really do riffs as such – a typical AK track weds an insistent hail of tremolo-picked guitar to relentlessly driving drum/bass patterns, bursting out of the traps and building inexorably to moments where everything sounds like it might fly apart, the guitar ever on the verge of, but never quite, slipping its rhythmic moorings. The second track might well be the peak in that respect, while the fifth adds spiralling space rock guitar and the closing sixth recalls Voix’s most atmospheric passages.
D’En Haut by D’En Haut
You’ll know by now that the Pagans label and the La Nóvia collective are two of the most crucial incubators of talent within the French folk scene, and with D’En Haut’s self-titled second album they’ve helped to bring one of the year’s most compelling releases into the world. D’En Haut are the duo of well-established figures of the new folk movement, Thomas Baudoin and Romain Colautti. Both sing (largely in Occitan, as far as I can tell) and employ a variety of instruments, including drone boxes and percussion. The latter is crucial; D’En Haut finds the pair singing traditional religious songs (“generally about love”, they say), chanting in harmony over lattices of clacky, woody percussion, bells, drone and buzzing acoustic bass. It grabs you from first moments of ‘Au Paradis’, earthbound but gesturing towards transcendence, through the lolloping ‘Quian Èri Joen Pastor’, the wonky folk blues of ‘Lo Pair De La Novia’ and achingly doleful and dreamlike closer ‘Hilhòta De Delà L’aiga’. Weirdly hooky, vigorous and, in moments, rapturously psychedelic, D’En Haut might well be this year’s French folk masterpiece.
Le Rêve de Polyphème by Polyphème
Le Rêve De Polyphème, also on Pagans, departs completely from the French folk brief. It’s a sparkling collaboration between the Nanterre-based, eight-person gamelan ensemble Gamelan Puspawarna (‘gamelan’ refers at once to the instrumentarium, the musical style and the group) and darbuka-player Wassim Halal, wedding Balinese music to Halal’s exploration of Lebanese and Turkish romani influences. The interlocking gamelan phrases, chiming and rippling, sit so beautifully with Halal’s nimble, shuffling beats that there isn’t a dull moment on the 19-minute ‘L’heureux Loup’. Elsewhere electronic sounds and effects are introduced. On ‘Murmurations’ a trickling synth sound is like a gentle massage and the sounds from the ensemble appear at times to be on the verge of dissolving. By contrast ‘Cynoque’ opens with bursts of noise like digitally processed animal cries before hitting you with a high-speed barrage of frantic, metallic polyrhythms. Le Rêve De Polyphème is a wonderfully successful experiment, by turns meditative and invigorating.
Tales of Uncertainty by GRIVE
Here’s a beautifully wintry debut album from Agnès Gayraud, of La Féline, and Paul Régimbeau, who records solo as Mondkopf as well as with bands including Foudre! (you’ll want to keep an eye out for the release of the latter’s stunning Voltæ Chthulucene a little later this year). A subtly reworked ‘Burger Shack’, survives from their 2021 EP, and it sounds even more exquisite, a two-chord arpeggio and Gayraud’s lonesome lilt buffeted by increasingly powerful waves of siren-like synth and crackling guitar. With the exception of stirring synth ballad ‘How Many Years’, the slow burn is Grive’s preferred mode, as the pair (usually working with a drummer) build layers of bruised, stoner-ish guitar and detuned synth drones. Gayraud’s always had a cinematic sensibility but the shift to English has opened up a different lyrical mode that, in this musical context, evokes wide-angle shots of North America’s vast open spaces and mythological landscapes, characters crying out in the wilderness or “weighed down by something heavy” at the foot of a mountain (as is the case in ‘Quicksands’).
Pre Country by Lucy Sissy Miller
Cheers to New Forest-based Métron for providing a home to another remarkably intimate French record, after Audrey Carmes Quelque Chose S’est Dissipé last year. Paris-based, Franco-British Miller’s release is also inspired by American mythology and burrows deep into her interior landscape, where associations and impressions derived from Paris, Texas and Twin Peaks become enmeshed with her own stories. ‘Le Ranch De Mes Rêves’ (The Ranch Of My Dreams) is perhaps the key here, not just for its title but for the fact that it’s a strange sort of cover: we hear Miller singing along with a crackly recording of the original, a song from 1936 performed by French icon Sheila, as though we’re eavesdropping on a private moment – and perhaps we are, since the album incorporates sources including voice memos and other collected sounds. Sheila’s song is itself a cover of American country tune ‘Hotel Happiness’, so it reaches us, on Pre-Country, having been twice refracted through a French prism. The rest of this dream diary is full of poignant, translucent miniatures, field recording fragments, candyfloss country songs sung through Auto-Tune and Laurie Anderson-style vocal experiments. Gorgeous.
Broken Allures by Jac Berrocal + David Fenech + Vincent Epplay feat Cosey Fanni Tutti and Jah Wobble
This trio, which brings together two generations of the French underground, have drifted between labels, including Blackest Ever Black and Akuphone, while fine-tuning their collaboration. Broken Allures, their fifth and perhaps their best, brings in high-calibre guests in the form of Cosey Fanni Tutti (who provides unmistakable vocals, guitar and cornet as well as lyrics for two tracks) and Jah Wobble. The expanded team flesh out the group’s dark Fourth World-y sound – but not too much; it still retains its wraithlike eeriness, with Berrocal’s trumpet lines snaking around industrial grooves, tribal rhythms, atonal stabs of guitar, stark electronic pulsations and probing bass.
Rockfort Quietus Mix 38 – October 2024
Lucy Sissy Miller – ‘White Fleece’ (Métron Records)
Brama – ‘Onte Anar’ (Airfono)
D’En Haut – ‘Quan Èri Joen Pastor’ (Pagans/La Nóvia)
Polyphème – ‘Pan’ (Pagans)
Matthieu Prual, Carol Robinson, Toma Gouband, Gabriel Lemaire, Joris Rühl – ‘Eau To Crunch’ (Ormo/Pagans)
Grive – ‘Burger Shack’ (Talitres)
Variéras – ‘Aux Éclats Ensevelis’ (Hylé Tapes)
Midget ! – ‘Qui Parle Ombre’ (Objet Disque)
Aluk Todolo – ‘●●•●●••’ (Self-released)
Jacques Berrocal, David Fenech, Vincent Epplay feat Cosey Fanny Tutti – Viva La Hacienda (Cold Spring)
Caïn و Muchi – ‘Dounia’ (Gros:Œuvre)
Violence Gratuite – ‘Baleine à Boss’ (Hakuna Kulala)
FOUDRE! – Visions from Zūrūtetsu (Zamzamrec/Nahal)
