entretiens

echoing souls

#1. la percussion

Echoing Souls is a series of interviews with artists invited to perform at Sons d’hiver festival. It’s focusing on the intellectual and spiritual relationships they maintain with their musical instruments. What do the words that name their instruments evoke, and/or the artistic gestures applied to them, when viewed through the lenses of language, linguistics, transcendence, science, or technology ?
The series is built around the theme of a family of instruments : wind instruments, percussion, strings, electronic or hybrid.
As this 35th edition of the festival coincided with a wide diversity of percussion instruments—whether approached directly or incorporating mechanical percussive systems or digital coding (marimba, congas, balafon, drum kit, piano, djembe, synthesizer, zarb, etc.)—we wanted to celebrate the percussive dimension of the musical act with five remarkable artists : Benoît Delbecq, Dudù Kouaté, Chad Taylor, Jeremiah Chiu, and Famoudou Don Moye.

These interviews consist of common questions asked to all five musicians (“together”) and individual questions asked to each of them (“face-to-face”).

TOGETHER – common questions

FAMOUDOU DON MOYE

BLIP(s), BLAP(s), FLIP(s), FLAP(s), CHING-CHICKA-CHING, KAK-KAK-DU-KAK, DA-DOUUUM, BRAKK, BRAKK, TAKA-TOUK-TOUKA-TOUK, KA-BLAMMMM, SWISH, SWOPP, TI-TI-TI-TIZZZZZ, KA-DUNG, KA-DUNG, ZIIINNNGGG, and many more rhythms and expressions too numerous to mention ! ! !

Dudù KOUATÉ

Since time immemorial in Africa, the words to strike and to beat have been used to describe the act of playing percussion.
In other cultures, the verb to play has prevailed—a word that evokes joy and celebration and applies to all instruments.
But in today’s global context, it has become difficult to reduce percussion practice to just these two terms.
The world of percussion has evolved profoundly and now offers infinite possibilities in practice, performance, and sound perception.
From a contemporary perspective, we use many other terms to describe these new ways of playing : striking, snapping, beating, brushing, trembling, scraping, rolling, muting, or even bowing objects foreign to the traditional world of percussion—as is the case with electronic generators of percussive sounds.

FAMOUDOU DON MOYE

Gold, purple, silver, red, blue, yellow, white, black ; through fire, water, clouds ; from the earth to the wide-open sky and into the cosmos—to humbly embody/project these colors into feelings, human emotions, the power of rhythms, harmonies, and melodies in my music ! ! !

Dudù KOUATÉ

The color I most spontaneously associate with percussion is earthy brown, a symbol of grounding, materiality, and natural elements.
But sometimes orange dominates my imagination—a color of warmth, movement, vitality, and dancing rhythms.

Jeremiah CHIU

All sounds (synthesized or sampled) represent a spectrum of timbres and tones. In some ways, choosing a single color to represent a sound feels limiting. By that, I mean that color does not exist in a vacuum.
For example, if I were to paint my room with a single swatch of blue paint, that blue hue would shift dramatically throughout the day depending on lighting conditions and my perception. It is never static. So yes, the blue may come from the same can of paint, but the expression of that blue on each surface is entirely different—always in motion. 
Similarly, nature is never static. It feels more like a multitude of multitudes, a clock of times.

face-to-face – individuals questions

When I compose—and by extension when I improvise—I look for phenomena that produce a certain impression or feeling. Percussion is one of my many tools ; I love it because it acts on the dance of the world. The piano holds many possibilities that accents—more percussive ones—help to reveal.

The spiritual dimension of my connection with Africa stems from five decades of participation, as a percussionist (hand-drum player), in the rites and rituals of the traditional religions of Santería and Vodou, which have blessed my soul and saved my life during times of crisis…
The musical dimension of this connection comes from more than six decades of studying, learning, rehearsing, and performing—through my Afro-American interpretation of the rhythms and melodies of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Colombia, Brazil, Mali, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Congo, North Africa, and South Africa…
To further deepen my relentless pursuit of the “Pan-African pulse” throughout the diaspora and beyond… Ache ! ! ! ! !

World peace through creative productivity, ancestral blessings !

The word “Teugg” can mean both to strike and to forge—hence its use to name the blacksmith. Gesture often dictates the term used to describe it, as is the case with many African instruments whose names are of onomatopoeic origin.
This linguistic choice does not reflect lexical poverty, but rather the expressive richness and descriptive simplicity of African languages, deeply rooted in the concrete and the sensory.
By integrating multiple perspectives, we seek to grasp the rich and plural essence of music as a vital element of these peoples’ identities.
The African continent is home to more than 2,000 ethnic groups, differing in languages, cultures, environments, and ways of life—each carrying a singular vision of music and rhythm.

Space and sound are also without limits. I wrote a composition on my album The Daily Biological entitled Between Sound and Silence. Time exists between sound and silence, but we may not be able to perceive or understand it. That is the unknown. I have always been interested in recognizing the unknown, not only in music but in life. When we face the unknown, possibilities become infinite.

“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.” — Sun Ra

With synthesis, I am always drawn to expressions where it’s impossible to hear exactly how something was made. This sometimes comes from overlapping complexities in sound modulation, editing, or both. The relationship is no longer one-to-one, and it feels new.
I often create polyrhythms on the modular by sequencing… a sequence. For example, I might build a rhythm in 4/4, then improvise on the sequence that clocks that 4/4 rhythm by adding spaces, rests, multiplications, etc. There’s a lot of math involved in this process, but that’s not what interests me per se. What interests me is how it sounds, how it feels, how it’s generative, malleable, and imperfect.
With other instruments, like the piano, you can usually see or hear which key is being played, and the relationship is much more direct. With synthesis, I like the mystery. I’m interested in the organic, human quality of sound. It tells a story and can carry the same raw, emotional energy as a voice. Electricity, as we know, is neither fixed nor singular—it’s alive ; it oscillates. So when composing or performing, I rarely think about the math behind the compositions or sound creation, and instead focus on listening to how sounds interact with their environment.