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 they 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 lexicon, the idioms and the most convulsive images. Then to experiment with them to the brink of the abyss, to cannibalise them, to open them up, to tilt them, to put 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 hijackings, and heterogeneous 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).

The collaboration between La Baracande and Sing Sing raises questions and seeks to give form to these questions. A form that is impure, heretical, unstable and uneven, full of echoes, rumours and spectres (rock bancroche, possessed blues, deviant pop, free jazz, nursery rhymes, canticles and tarantellas) seeks to keep itself as lively and eventful as possible.

With support from DRAC Auvergne Rhône-Alpes, the Haute-Loire département, La Grande Boutique – scène conventionnée d’intérêt national Art en territoire, Le Périscope, L’Embarcadère and Pop.