To be published in LP and CD on 04/02/21 by Les Disques du Festival Permanent, Pagans et Murailles Music.
Artwork and illustration by Camille Lavaud
Built like an invented tarot game, De Mòrt Viva explores the idea of a contemporary paganism in ten exhilarating, humorous and spiritual odes.
The Auvergnat Occitan establishes itself on the floor, spreading out its metaphorical and multi-layered netting, imbued with the particular candor of a newly acquired language. The melody is born of the word, the poem gives birth to the song, in a way that could remind from a distance and without erudition, of the trobar, the art of the troubadours.
In this album-game, each piece describes a possible situation, with its typical emotions and stakes, its often-reversible force systems, the sense of which eludes the black and white way of thinking. Drawing on the ageless figures of the Carnival, these ten arcane songs will maybe bring to our awareness a way to think differently of the contemporary concerns.
Toujours hybride et exploratoire, la musique de Sourdure se révèle ici sous un visage neuf. Exosquelette ou révélateur chimique, l’électronique se camoufle dans les aspérités de la chanson comme pour en troubler les contours. Emportée par une armada de percussions et d’instruments à vent, la voix prend naturellement sa place forte, susurrant, savourant la langue d’oc comme un vin macéré.
We can hear:
– Laurent Boithias, hurdy-gurdy – Eloïse Decazes (Arlt), vocals and concertina – Josiane Guillot, vocals – Wassim Hallal, daf – Maud Herrera, vocals – Elisa Trébouville (Bourrasque, Sourdurent), banjo and vocals – Amélie Pialoux (Ensemble Nulla Dies Sine Musica), cornett, early trumpets – Jacques Puech (La Nòvia, Sourdurent), cabrette (sort of bagpipe)
Pulled from this new tarot, here the rupture card:
The hot season over, the last fruits fallen, the slate is clean and apocalyptic particles diffuse in the air. The exterior closes on the interior depths. The necessary recession incubates a promise of flowering in more favorable times. Then the song puts on its prayer costume, clothes itself with incantatory finery to call the harsh season and embrace its change of course.
Active within several adventurous ensembles (Orgue Agnès, Kaumwald, Tanz Mein Herz), Ernest Bergez brings together the electronic and acoustic string instruments in a logic of hybridization.
As a soloist under the name of Sourdure, he invades the traditional repertory of the Massif Central and develops a personal and cobbled together form of song, in French and Auvergnat Occitan.
Prospective and empirical, his approach is located at the junction between an experimental spirit, a violin and song practice attached to the popular traditions of the Massif Central, a poetical research in the French-Occitan bilingualism and a long habit of cooking with various electronic instruments and tools.
With the creation in 2019 of the Sourdurent quartet, with Jacques Puech, Elisa Trébouville and Loup Uberto, he writes in Occitan, at the service of a music of intoxication and communion, and assuming a leaning towards the popular music of the middle east and the Mediterranean rim.
Sourdure aligns its aesthetic research and poetical quest in Occitan in De Mòrt Viva, a conceptual record that takes the forms of clairvoyant systems, to be released at Pagans’, Les Disques du Festival Permanent and Murailles Music on Avril 2, 2021.