Évohé Bègue Bégayer

The "evohé" is the song of the Bacchants during the carnival. It is a bloody and humorous song that humiliates everything. In Euripides' work, the evohé is screamed when the city of Thebes is torn apart by fever and masquerade. Everyone laughs and sings, the maenads set the city on fire, masks pierce and disfigure the inhabitants, and Agave eats the head of King Pentheus, her son.

One cannot explain what this song is; one would need to describe the flip side of the sung, its extremity. Perhaps one cannot even hear it... most likely, the song has already affected us before crossing the threshold of our lucidity. It wells up... It glides over memory; one cannot know its melody, there are no lyrics, no notation, no tradition, no learning... no university of the sung abyss can be established. The orgy of matter is sovereign and incommunicable; the song it gives birth to is always alien, foolish, and lost; it is a sung panic. -Pan's panic, offering a pack of blind dogs to Artemis and suggesting, in passing, to send them hunting in her debauchery. The dogs of naked nature run like mad at an impossible speed, devouring every creature they scent in the wind, consuming all flesh within their reach. One can imagine that the pack reappears invariably in too assertive human affairs, facing certainties against which its wildness imposes itself more violently than against anything else. For example: when we are a bit pleased with ourselves, sensing the impression of having composed, of having imposed our order on the order of matter... immediately, it seems we can hear them barking in the distance. We freeze, we listen, we would prefer to believe it's hallucinations. But no. It is indeed the order of matter returning to express itself with the dogs. Order pours over us, the carnival imposes itself, and while the dogs eat our heads, they offer to admit that the foundation of our order was all soft, all foolish and spongy, all decomposed, that the decomposed order from below, the sincerity of matter, had never ceased to be orgiastic. When the dogs devour us, it's because Pan has brought back the mud. He has ladled a large serving of material broth back onto us; he has made all things copulate again. One imagines a song that is not at all solemn but belongs to a kind of cold and sacred-less mystique; it is the grip of the sovereign jester. An apparently disorderly and boldly stammering song that sees itself overturned and enjoys it...

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 of 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.

Now the trio has become a quintet working towards a new kind of concert : with no beginning and no end, in which concert-time and quotidian time merge in order to deliberately drain of any autonomy the temporality of performance. Through the vocals, the homemade percussion and numerous strange instruments, two immutable musical activities will be celebrated and brought to bear on each other: the song of the people, whose cry of hunger and togetherness breaks through the barrier between art and life – and the art of performance explored as communal effort to describe our times.