Each month, music journalist Sophian Fanen (The Days website) announces its selection in 5 titles.
His playlist
– Dowdelin, Mama We, Feat. Voodoo Game, from the album Lanmou Lanmou (Underdog Records, 2022)
– Ti Blica, Vou é Mwensingle (Blica Family, 2022) see the clip
-Dijon, many timesfrom the album Absolutely (Dark Green/Warner, 2021) see the clip
-Jana Horn, Jordanfrom the album Optimism (No Quarter Records, 2022) see the clip
– Abdullah Ibrahim, Blue Bolerofrom the album Loneliness (Gearbox Records, 2022) see the clip.
Then #Live session receives the group Dowdelin for the new album Lanmou Lanmou (Underdog Road).
No place of music is fixed. No music can stand still. But it is rare that it evades geography and genealogy as much as with Dowdelin. Creole language, Caribbean beat, urban energies, dazzling virtuosity, sensual electro. The group plays in a unique place where genres and colors, heritages and audacities are intertwined.
Lanmou Lanmou, Dowdelin’s second album, blurs the maps, the tracks, the lines – everything that should reassure the conservatives and the lazy, the defenders of official reggae, correct zouk, patented jazz or historic canal beguine. As with the languages, cultures and nations of the Caribbean which are never quite from Europe, nor completely from Africa, one would be very embarrassed if one had to define where exactly Dowdelin is by searching the official world map. music – a Creole afro-futurism, a crossroads of the black Atlantic…
At the beginning of the Dowdelin adventure, a web of encounters and loyalties. David Kiledjian alias Dawatile, producer and multi-instrumentalist composer meets Oliva, singer from Lyon of Martinican origin. They jam and model titles in English. Nothing very convincing until she started to sing then in Creole. Everything becomes clear then: the language of the small French islands of the West Indies deploys its revolutionary universality.
David then recalls Raphaël Philibert, percussionist, saxophonist and singer who has always been involved in extending the field of gwo ka, drumming music from Guadeloupe, of which his uncle, Georges Troupé, is a daring adventurer. This is the birth of Dowdelin and the evidence is confirmed: we remember then that when the poet and theoretician Édouard Glissant speaks of creolity as a vertigo of unpredictability, he speaks of an adventure that nothing announcement in the history of the world: Europeans and Africans precipitated on a third continent where, in the mad dream of creating a New World and in the mass crime of slavery and the spoliation of the Amerindian peoples, languages are born , cultures, music – interbreeding, catharsis, intoxication, resistance.
Dowdelin releases his first album, carnival odyssey, in 2018. Gourmet spirits ignite for music with moving contours and countless cousinages. It’s confirmation that purity activists will always have issues with mixed-race identities —”not enough jazz for my festival“, “it’s too much for mine“… But, many concerts in France and Great Britain mainly and big buzz among lovers of the vertigo of free music.
The circle widens with the arrival of Greg Boudras, drummer who has worked with David in other adventures (Vaudou Game, Fowatile, The Bongo Hop…), to complete Dowdelin and design this second album. The roadmap ? “We do not seek to create combinations of experiences or conscious patchworks of our influencessummarizes David. It’s more about feelings, mixtures that happen unconsciously. So, sometimes, we see things popping up that surprise us, like a fragment of an English synth pop hit, which we are the only ones to recognize. There is never the same recipe twice: a song I made at home with my instruments and my daughter’s toys, sound designs on which Raphaël and Greg bring rhythmic elements that change everything, compositions more collective…”
Then the texts emerge, written in Creole, English or French by David and Raphaël, who are also linguists and experts in Creole languages. Messages of love and fight, of fraternity and memory… And, from title to title, the generous dynamic of creolization is still at work, biguine embracing hip hop, contemporary jazz weaving with reggae, creole dialoguing with the vast palette of music which are its daughters or its sisters.
Dowdelin: to read also on RFI Musique.
Performed titles
– Sime Love LIVE RFI see the clip
– On Nou Alé excerpt from the album Lanmou Lanmou
– Tan Nou LIVE RFI see the clip.
The musicians
Gwendoline Victorin (Olivia), singing
Gregory Boudrasbattery
Raphael Philibertpercussion
David Kiledjiankeyboard/saxophone.
His : Fabien Mugneret & Benoit Letirant.