La Baracande

After two programmes devoted to the repertoire of Virginie Granouillet, La Baracande turns its attention to Réveillez, wandering quest songs and memento mori that sometimes rather easily raise the spectre of the Last Judgement.
The group asked Sing Sing (one half of the duo Arlt) to choose a handful of these songs and rewrite them as he saw fit, if only to get rid of their overly catechistic character. Rather than simply updating the themes or vocabulary to make them more ‘contemporary’ and more secular and comfortable, Sing Sing decided to bring out the lexical field, the idioms and the most convulsive images, then experiment with them to the very edge of the abyss, cannibalising them, opening them up, tilting them, putting them through the fire of amorous parody to see them shine. The result is a collection of songs full of holes, grafts and collages, wild overflows and diversions, and motley contributions (the books of Ramuz, carnival, a particularly crude form of rural surrealism, haiku, Pasolini, the Russian novel, Dada, oral tradition and children's literature).
"Les Réveillez" revisited summon the terrified Devil, God returned to his moving solitude, and the weather, which drives one mad by having itself gone mad. In a grand tapestry of joy, fear, laughter and gravity, constantly merging the profane and the sacred, they seem to be alternately traversed and worked by the sovereign barbarities of childhood, seized with intoxication, struck with madness.
La Baracande and Sing Sing seek together how to contaminate each other and how to bring into tension the sense of drama of one and the inclination of the other towards a kind of holy idiocy, a form of comic liturgy. How to reconcile vitality, a taste for silence and a sense of noise, respect for melodies and a tendency towards vandalism, humble perpetuation and a desire for freedom.
The collaboration between La Baracande and Sing Sing raises questions and seeks to give form to those questions. An impure, heretical, unstable, uneven form that, filled with echoes, rumours and spectres (rock bancroche, possessed blues, deviant pop, free jazz, nursery rhymes, hymns and tarantellas), seeks to remain as lively and eventful as possible.

Basile Brémaud / vocals, guitar, beam
Pierre-Vincent Fortunier / bagpipes, violin
Yann Gourdon / electronics
Guilhem Lacroux / guitar, bass pedalboard
David Fauroux / sound technician