Saturday 19 February 2022, 8pm
Active as part of several adventurous groups (Orgue Agnès, Kaumwald, Tanz Mein Herz), Ernest Bergez brings electronic and acoustic instruments together into a logic of hybridization.
Solo under the name of Sourdure, he delves in the traditional repertoire of the Massif Central area and develops an idiosyncratic form of songwrinting, in French and Occitan. Prospective and empirical, his approach is found at the junction between a spirit of experimentation, a practice of violin playing and singing rooted in popular tradition, a poetic research in Franco-Occitan bilingualism and a long habit of cooking with various electronic tools.
With the creation of the quartet ‘Sourdurent‘ in 2019, alongside Jacques Puech, Elisa Trébouville and Loup Uberto, he dives deeper into Occitan writing and traditional inspired composing, seeking for a music of euphoria and communion with an assumed tropism for popular music from the Middle East and the Mediterranean coasts.
Sourdure continues his quest for unusual poetic and sonic forms on De Mòrt Viva, a concept album thought as a divinatory system. Constructed like an invented tarot deck, ‘De Mòrt Viva’ explores the idea of a contemporary paganism in ten jubilant, humorous and spiritual odes.
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French songs, noises, rumors of distant and early musics, short and cruel poems, handcrafted instruments, radio-amplifiers, circuit bending and other wasted electronic devices, « Bégayer » (the french word for « stutter ») pursues a gesture for those without a folklore, for this culture of void, structured by the gloaming of popular habitus as well as glitches from noise music, influenced by the public squares as well as the swarming of numerical flows, for a original kind of wog-rapsodists.
This culture of void has to be seen as a cruel joy, the occasion for a conjunction beetween strange interpretations of ancient signs, popular forms and contemporaneous attempts. It is the construction of singular variations and overflows.
For Jean Rouch, a horizon for modern anthropologists was to « put disturbing objects into motion », thus every song is a distance to experiment, an etude which is watching us. Thus every stutterer song wants to be a disturbing and joyful object, whose cruel cimplicity, obstinacy, unfolds itself as an object of unquietness.
A true gem from the Portugese underground. Sparse electronics blended with mystic vocal-ism — think Ghédalia Tazartes on the coffee by Diamanda Galás.
Deep in the Portugese underground Calhau! is con-structing an absurd universe in which nightmares, rural Catholic mysticism and surrealist spirituality play the lead role. Performance, movie and music are contributing to one melancholic and cruel whole. The music is deeply rooted in Roman mysticism, using the dark hand of alchemy to beseech the insane 21st century.
The duo sounds like an updated verion of Ghédalia Tazartes and Throbbing Gristle, blending tape collages and sparse electronics, not unlike the PAN back catalogue.
Foremost, Calhau! are their own isle, at the point where the Old Europe disappears in the sea.
