The Sonic Protest festival has been working, since 2003, to spread the singularities that sound. For this 4th welcome to Gentilly,three groups as underground as they are lunar will come to vibrate the walls of the Générateur.
Cutting to the quick through notions of style that reduce sound and musical practices to labels, this rendezvous dedicated to the great-arts-that-make-good also gives a chance to hear artists with a historical dimension as much as young shoots that are clearing… through a sum of attempts and first times.
This nomadic, joyful and generous event creates, with each edition, a listening itinerary with stages as distinct as each other, in Paris, all around and even elsewhere.
A temporary spatial and sonic space like no other, Sonic Protest draws its map of the tender between noise, sound and music and presents a mini-panorama all subjective of the musical vivacities of scenes here and elsewhere.
Event co-produced with Instants Chavirés
IGNATZ & DE STERVENDEN HONDEN
Bram Devens: guitar and vocals
Tommy De Nys: bass
Erik Heestermans: drums
Ignatz is the alter ego of Flemish musician Bram Devens.
Using a simple acoustic guitar and a few effects, he creates his own Euro blues style, often based on improvisation. The songs of Ignatz derive from a stripped-down, sparse folk framework, always limpid and emotive. Always outside the box, Ignatz‘s sonic spectrum navigates a kind of drifting primitivism, somewhere between the Velvet Underground and Henry Flint. The cold, even dark touch that can escape from his compositions actually reveals a stifled, deep warmth. In 2013, a friend (tired of Ignatz‘s solo gigs sic) suggested he play his music in a band with Erik Heestermans on drums and Tommy De Nys on bass (Tommy is incidentally a programmer at the excellent Ateliers Claus in Brussels).
Many recordings are or have been available via Okraina Records, Fonal, Feeding Tubes… A new LP has just been released on Dennis Tyfus‘s label, Ultra Eczema.
Beautiful and classy!
Theorem
Maïssa D. returns to Sonic Protest and it sets our hearts aflame. Her dazzling 2016 stint with the no-wave trioSIDA left a lasting impression on the brains of the souls in attendance. His solo repertoire shines in the starry sky of hexagonal post-punk like an uncontrollable meteorite ready to explode in our faces.
Martial and delirious, his songs (in French in the text) obsess with their mid-tempo rhythms slathered in synth-punk. Kool Shen in a tracksuit awkwardly plays with Le Pen’s eye in a medieval rave party full of toothless ghosts.
At once bewitched by this unstable siren song, there’s only one conclusion: Théorème is for life.
While you’re waiting for him, we highly recommend listening to his Dopazione show on Lyl Radio or reading his contributions to the excellent Ventoline fanzine.
TANZ MEIN HERZ
Tanz Mein Herz is one of the finest jewels of France’s musical underground. The ensemble consists of Guilhem Lacroux (guitar),Pierre-Vincent Fortunier (bagpipes),Pierre Bujeau (guitar), Mathieu Tilly (drums), Ernest Bergez (violin), Jérémie Sauvage (bass) and Alexis Degrenier, musicians already seen in other excellent projects: France, La Tène, Omertà, Sourdure… If the ethereal folk magic formula was already perfectly operative from their first album in the form of a hallucinated jam in 2015 (“Territory”, Standard InFi), beware though. The music on Tanz Mein Herz was a dreamy incantation, but it is now also at times the soundtrack to a western filmed in the Cantal at 41° in the middle of a drought alert. The band are veritable doctors of drone and coda, and authentic jewelers of the proto ritornello, most songs possessing the psychedelia of a polka/bourrée/other traditional dances slowed down x3. The sonic and mysterious beauty intrinsic to their ancient instrumentarium resonates on their new album, the magnificent Quattro. Moondog once released a record bearing the name “new sound of an old instrument”: hard to find a better maxim to describe the sound of Tanz Mein Herz.
