the essential
Boucan returns to the Bijou this Wednesday January 23 to present “Ballad of Kairos”, his third album. Noise and energy, but also voices, landscapes and sublime reliefs.
Three years ago almost to the day, Brunoi Zarn and Mathias Imbert, who form the duo Boucan, launched their second album at Le Taquin, “Colères Mammouth”. This Wednesday, at the Bijou, they will present the excellent “Ballad of Kairos” (Atarraya/Inouïe distribution) which will be released on January 31.
“We composed everything together, Mathias and I,” explains Brunoi (guitar, banjo and voice). We met occasionally to create these songs, then we worked on the arrangements with Bastien Pelenc and once the pieces were ready, we went in England.” Across the Channel, Brunoi and his friend double bassist-drummer-singer found the brilliant producer John Parish (who produced people like PJ Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Eels, Arno), who had already produced their first album. The result, one year later, is sumptuous. Somewhere between the battered worlds of Tom Waits, Kusturica or spaghetti westerns, Boucan invents timeless music, enjoyable and heartbreaking like a Slavic procession. The voices thunder out words that are overwhelming but no one understands – and for good reason: they mean nothing! “This idea comes from our tours in Germany, confides the native of Graulhet, in Tarn. We realized that our songs appealed to people who understood nothing of what we were saying! A liberation: we no longer had need to say words, but only care about the musicality of the sounds The voices, suddenly, took on another magnitude…”.
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The “kairos” of the album’s title evokes a Greek philosophical concept: seizing the crucial moment that must be recognized and seized, a “qualitative opportunity”, a serendipity which upsets the plans to give birth to a sublime accident . There is no more pleasant noise than that which is born in spontaneity, desire and urgency. “We were in the studio with G. W. Sok, the ex-singer of The head, John Parish told us, it’s okay, that’s it. We tried to protest, but we understood that he was right, it’s the present moment – we have a lot. thought about this after the disappearance of our trumpeter Piero Pépin in 2020…”
“It’s a record that we are very proud of,” assures Brunoi. “Now, we are going to defend it on stage, where the energy is incomparable, where the sound is different, the arrangements are different, because we have decided not to be that both of them in concert, the stage is kairos at its optimum, that’s where it’s about making an impression.” And Bruno and Mathias know how to do that.
