La Tène + Sourdure

Baba Yaga's Hut present:

La Tène + Sourdure at Cafe Oto, September 26th

Ten years ago, La Tène released their first record, then as a trio with Cyril Bondi, d’Incise, and Alexis Degrenier. A decade, four albums, and multiple collaborations later, the group returns with Moreïne/Déclives—an album that feels as much like a celebration as it does an upheaval. True to its identity, La Tène continues to explore the cracks between tradition and experimentation, between hypnotic drone and repeated gestures, but this time they choose to move onto new ground: the hurdy-gurdy, the group’s emblematic instrument since the very beginning, disappears in favor of a stripped-down setup centered on two electronic percussions and live dub work.

This is not a mere stylistic twist: it is about transforming a constraint into a creative drive. Alexis Degrenier, long associated with the telluric sound of the hurdy-gurdy, can no longer play it. Yet he remains, above all, recognized as a percussionist and composer. With his companions, he decided to inscribe this transition into the very heart of the album: a way of thumbing their nose at fate, of turning a great and beautiful page, and of reminding us that La Tène has always fed on accidents, detours, and bifurcations.

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An artist based in Thiers (63), 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.