French Chanson, Noise, echoes of music from faraway and long ago, modified radio transistors and other old electronic gear… After releasing several sets of raw, almost entirely improvised direct-to-tape recordings duplicated by hand in a workshop on the border of the Bauges mountain chain, the Bégayer Trio made new friends. Orphans without a home, they were welcomed like brothers by the Parisian label Le Saule, spotted by the chic Geneva-based Bongo Joe Records, and thus were able to devote a year to the making their debut album, “Terrain à mire. Une maison rétive. Contrainte par le toit.”
Co-produced by the two families mentioned above, the album was a first beam in the musical structure laid by this trio of Alpine fellows: what they sought was the most exact form of mutt-itude, a nomadic journey through intentionally scrambled ancient musical signs by way of French, Italian and Arabic song, gleefully following René Char’s aphorism, later borrowed and translated by Hannah Arendt as “Our inheritance was left to us by no testament.”
Bégayer’s mission– in the name of those without tradition, the rejects of a culture of scarcity born in the twilight of popular customs amidst the screams of Noise on village squares and in the flow of digital swarms– is to create a hitherto unknown genre of hybrid gypsy rhapsody.
The culture of scarcity can be experiences as a kind of cruel joy, an occasion to bridge the unsteady interpretation of ancient practices with contemporary experiments and build upon singular variations and excess. Up to now, every stutter-song intended to produce a joyful though disquieting object whose obstinacy and cruel simplicity triggered a disturbance, a distancing, a studied thing that stares right back at us.
AL HUTCHINS is the lead singer of The Courtesy Group and is also an active and published poet.
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