The encounter seems so natural… that it becomes surprising. So many common points unveiled in such a short time, it greatly looks like a musical miracle. At the beginning, the cunning idea comes from the local Sakifo festival : to mingle the inspiration of the punk of maloya, Nathalie Natiembé, with the brilliant Dadaist wanderings of the Bumcello pair , aka Vincent Segal and Cyril Atef.
A short residence is booked during the year 2007, just before an August performance at the Festival. It’s a success, followed by a second concert in October of the same year at the Fiesta des Suds, and repeated the following year at the Sakifo. Both aesthetes of rhythmics, frequently playing behind M, showing themselves madly crazy about the intense island. It has to be said that the duettists were not setting off in unknown lands. Alain Peters was part of their references and maloya as well as séga really speak to them.
And as Natiembé knows about rock and knows how to make her Créole poetry vibrate beyond the local rhythms, undoubtedly, the symbiosis between both universes revealed itself an intuitive collusion. It would have been a pity not to transform these stage tries into a record. Thus the idea was applied and five days of studio booked before the Sakifo festival , just to put it into the can, during the Southern Winter of 2008. It was planned over 10 days , but everybody likes to work fast, in a rush, seize the opportunities and not let the ideas vanish into a time that has become abstract.
It’s Costa, member of Zong, now a sound master in the Indian Ocean zone, after having worked for Menwar from Mauritius and the previous Natiembé’s opus who is given the responsibility of putting the announced adventure into the box. Neither discussion nor rehearsal is organized before the beginning of the sessions… An urgent need to confront themselves on D Day. As a way to raise the apprehension , the tension , for weeks, days and hours preceding the studio- and once there, let everything go. But Vincent will have his favourite amplifier: a 1966 Fender Bassman providing the vintage touch.
A few hours to get the right disposition, the right sound… Optimize. And here we go! First session, 47 minutes sharp. Followed by other multiple takes during 4 days. In the middle of all these recordings, Costa is going to do his job, search ,mix, harmonize, find the lightnings which make this record appear as a marvellous sonorous UNO, astonishingly coherent, built and thought over. Eight tracks collected in a record released on Sakifo Records label distributed by Wagram.
Both boisterous kids from Bumcello, always demanding, integrate Natiembé’s universe with an extreme elegance. The singer lets herself go in an admiring way, knows how to put herself in touch with the others and tread on dangerous grounds proposed by the pair without losing her head , looking for and finding connexion points. We call this “Karma”.
