Our 1er guest is kepa for sound output 2th album Divine Morphine (Editions Miliani).
It’s always the same song, the one that fits in one word. Five letters, three consonants and two vowels. A B, an L, a U, an E and the plural mark at the end. An international word, which designates at the same time a music, an emotional state and vaguely a color. Do you have it there? Hush… You don’t have to write it down, or name it, so as not to fall into its clichés, or take listeners to Kepa’s second album there. Kepa doesn’t want to hear about it anymore, yet he has it. In his metal guitar which, in the right hands, resembles an Aladdin’s lamp, a mythological sword. In his harmonica, this instrument that makes the brain tremble when played with the heart. In his everyday life and even every yesterday. Deep in his guts, like a shiver that goes up to his vocal cords, a super power that you also have to be afraid of. In his genes, his aching body, his altered blood. In the title of this new album, Divine Morphine. The first, released three years ago, was called Doctor, Do Something. A beginning of concept, always the same song, like a long-lasting affection. Kepa caught it like a disease. In 2013, Kepa was called Bastien Duverdier and he lived the life of a professional skateboarder, an augmented human capable of traveling far and soaring on a skateboard. Suddenly, he felt himself growing old. Consumed by an autoimmune disease that has turned his life upside down, the hounds of hell are on his heels, who will never let him go. He found a lifeline, without wheels but with strings, in music, practiced on his metal guitar and preferably on one or two rotating chords, in search of an inner trance, a musical vibration. -therapeutic, of a self-shamanic rite. Bastien became a musician, leaving in 2018 Doctor, Do Something, first album produced with Taylor Kirk of the Canadian group Timber Timbre. The album was very well received, and hundreds of concerts made known Kepa, his humor, his music and his pretty shirts.
But, despite all the good that we thought of Doctor, Do Somethingwe can affirm it without boasting: Divine Morphine is a thousand times better. Doctor, Do Something was a calling card. Divine Morphine is the story of an expedition to the depths of oneself, a journey to the end of confinement. No one will hear you scream. He made this record to try to understand, tame and tell about this illness that turned him upside down to the point of implosion, on the verge of madness. “Lead in Eldorado»he sings in duet with Sarah McCoy on the incredible dark-pop song Eldorado, a real hit from the new world. Lead in Eldorado, that’s kind of what everyone’s been feeling since 2020, right? The ordeal of some is Covid-19, his is called HLA-B27, for human leukocyte antigen. No one can experience it for him, but everyone can feel and appreciate how he healed himself with Divine Morphine. The first track is a little sound All Aboard (Muddy Waters) to him. A bass harmonica solo like a train song, which would have had its place on Doctor, Do Something, but which suddenly swirls, goes out of order and announces the sequel. The train has just derailed and entered another dimension, that of opiate vertigo, loss of control, music that dreams and drifts… A song will sound like the soundtrack of a western where Kepa makes a duel with himself (Dog Days). Another takes old Bukka White and Alan Vega dancing in a Detroit club during an earthquake (Wet Dream). For two occasions, Kepa kneels without prostrating himself in front of intimate totems: Hard Time Killin Floor Blues by Skip James (with Rodolphe Burger), and soda of Cesaria Evora in a hallucinated version, where we see the ocean freezing around the Cape Verde Islands.
Six feet Under ground stay in the tropics for a murder ballad. The song Divine Morphine is almost playful, indolent, a refrain in a trance. The instrumental Messe HLA-B27 shows Kepa’s dazzling guitaristic progress, freed from stylistic exercises, becoming his own master. His voice has also changed, he pushes it towards the complaint in hooting highs. He plays different instruments, keyboards like stalactites, trumpet and other things with his mouth, sound effects of unidentified origin. He is the one-man band of the Titanic, ultimately the only survivor of the sinking, then stranded on a desert island – the last piece, Merle, resembles the pagan prayer of a levitating Robinson. The album is now finished. No one will come out unscathed. And everyone will have only one desire: to return. Stephane Deschamps.
Performed titles
– Divine MorphineLive RFI
– soda, excerpt from the album Divine Morphine
– Eldorado, Live RFI
– Hard Time Killing Floorfrom the album Divine Morphine.
Then we receive jawhar for the album release Tasweerah (62TV/PIAS).
Tasweerah is the fourth album by Tunisian singer/songwriter Jawhar. Tasweerah means in Tunisian at the same time: portrait, image, but also: projection of the spirit… The album is a series of freeze frames, of more or less personal portraits. The songs are, each in their own way, attempts at a universal portrait of the artist. They question its place and that of the imagination in society, put “creation and the quest for beauty” at the center of the album. Deliberately raw and without artifice, Tasweerah plunges us back into the chiaroscuro folk / pop of Jawhar, proclaimed in the Arabic Dream Pop category.
Born to a mother who was a professor of Arabic literature, in love with music and poetry, and a father who devoted himself to theater and then to cultural politics, Jawhar grew up in the suburbs south of Tunis, in Radès. Very early on, he was fascinated by a certain popular culture, by the strength of its images and its verbal, musical and gestural expressions. When he left at the age of twenty to study English in Lille, it was rather abstract poetry that attracted him, that of William Blake and Emily Dickinson… In addition to a growing love for a certain Nick Drake who will link him irrevocably to his impressionist folk.
Performed titles
– malguit Live RFI
– Schizo Hyoutfrom the album Tasweerah see the clip
– Sayyed Ezzinfrom the album Tasweerah
– Foug Layyem Live RFI see the clip.
His : Fabien Mugneret, Mathias Taylor, Benoit Letirant.
(Rebroadcast March 27, 2022)