An artist based in Thiers, France Ernest Bergez, aka Sourdure, has been exploring the boundaries of distant sound worlds for the past ten years, combining a spirit of experimentation with a personal, hand-crafted approach to traditional musical objects. Hybrid and exploratory, Sourdure‘s music reveals itself in many facets: baroque inventions on traditional canvas, vociferous carnivalesque odes, stylistic borrowings from oriental music, sonic orfevrery marked by concrete music… Combined with the acoustic rusticity of the violin or the dotar (a Central Asian lute), electronics do their alchemical work, disturbing sound objects, altering perceptions and the course of time.

Whether exalted or bittersweet, the vocals borrow from the voices of classical Arabic, Turkish or Persian music. The Occitan language of Auvergne takes centre stage, deploying its metaphorical and polysemous mesh to express the common, the intimate and the sacred. The melody is born from the word, the poem gives birth to the song, in a form that could be distantly reminiscent of trobar, the art of the troubadours. A one-man orchestra, a single man playing from a universe of orchestras, Sourdure sings like the nose on your face.

Deep Triskell

Deep Triskell’s artistic approach falls within a scene that mesh experimental practices with traditional music and that has been strongly resurging in France in recent years. On the album, it takes the form of dissonant motives, typical of drones in traditional music - sometimes dark and lingering (“Devant le Silence Noir”), sometimes throbbing and techno-leaning (“Il recrache le diable”) - that Primault integrates into a broader idiosyncratic musical language, made of psychedelic figures developed via his High Wolf project and digital distortions - characteristic of his recent work as BZMC.

More than mere sonic motives, Deep Triskell borrows from Brittany’s traditional music scenes something fundamental: the sense of a space and time that is shared, and in which bodies - driven by an archaic energy conveyed by dance - form an insubordinate group; something deeply rooted in Breton culture, weaving its way through Fest-noz and Britany’s high-spirited free parties.