Reportage

Bout du monde festival, a 20th edition of fertile discoveries

Canadian singer Elisapie ends her European tour at the Bout du monde festival, August 2019. © RFI / Oliver Favier

08/06/2019

From August 2 to 4, 2019, the Bout du monde festival has ventured far beyond the dirt roads that connect the two stages of Kermarrec and Landadouec and the marquee of Cabaret Seb. This finistérien rendez-vous, which has seen the greatest names in French and international music over the past twenty years, has offered a bold and particularly rich discovery, this year, as the Canadian singer, Elisapie.

The audience of "Boudu" still has carnival tunes. In the evening, we could believe that the "Gras" of Douarnenez have taken their summer quarters on the other side of the bay, on the peninsula of Crozon. At the beginning of August, 60,000 have come here, disguised or not, for the 20th edition of a festival that, musically speaking, invites the world to perform at the end of the world. . To welcome them, no less than one thousand seven hundred volunteers have, this year again, a very large part of the organization of one of the great musical events of the Breton coast, halfway between Brest and Quimper.

For artists, the competition is tough, for the public, it is often heartbreaking. How to choose between the trances of the Barbarian Violins, which mix the Balkan, Mongol and French influences, associating the Bulgarian gadulka with morin khuur, a two-stringed and horse-headed fiddle, and the strange fusion of flamenco, folk and latino rhythm of Jenny & the Mexicats? What to prefer between the brilliant soul of the Franco-British Kimberose and the indefinable Yemen blues, that the insatiable curiosity of the singer Ravid Kalahani travels from the Red Sea to the US South through the traditions of West Africa?

Baloji "gets on" at Boudu

Some people seem to have given up running from one scene to another and lying in the grass, their eyes closed behind their sunglasses, abandon themselves to the multicultural feast like frantic compasses. Others come for the sure values ​​of French pop, Fire! Chatterton or Soldier Louis or for the Swiss Stephan Eicher , others finally, perhaps the most numerous.ses, go haphazardly luck.

The joy of discovery could be seen in many eyes at the end of the inflamed performance of the Belgian-Congolese singer Baloji , supremely accompanied on the guitar by Pierre "Dizzy" Mandjeku, to whom he paid tribute. The photographers present at the front of the stage stayed much longer than the first three pieces of use, literally snapped up by a show that changed into a visual as well as a visual feast.

It must be said that the sulphurous author of Bleu de nuit , came on stage in a suit of burgundy linen, head wrapped in a flower scarf under a large black hat, multiplying for three quarters of an hour the most fashionable dress variations. impromptu, taking the break, imitating an improbable military march, photographing the crowd before mingling with her, just as she seemed properly electrified.

© RFI / Oliver Favier

Boreal melancholy of Elisapie

More intimate was the performance of Elisapie, a Canadian singer discovered by the French public with her fourth album, The ballad of the runaway girl , the first to cross the Atlantic, which ended with the end of the world her European tour. Born in Salluit in northern Quebec 42 years ago, Elisapie sings in English, French and Inuktikut, an Inuit language with some 30,000 scattered speakers from eastern Siberia to northwestern Canada through 'Alaska.

She gave a broad overview of the variety of her melancholic pop talent, Do not make me blue, whose familiar chorus was taken up in chorus by the whole audience, up to the heartbreaking Unna ballad, dedicated to his biological mother. In this song, whose title means "Tiens" and which sounds like an offering, the adopted little girl addresses this absent figure to ask her if her birth was welcomed with the same love she has today for his three children.

The title track of the album as well as your old name, the only excerpt sung in French, will seduce the ears that had appreciated the first disc of compatriot Martha Wainwright, in 2005, of the singles Far away , Factory or When the day is short . Both instill the painful desire of an otherwise indefinable elsewhere, between wandering and flight.

His afternoon concert ended with an ode to the women of his home region, Arnaq , whose twilit sounds are reminiscent of Kamchatka's haunting Korean singer Viktor Tsoï. At the crossroads of cultures that touch three continents, Elisapie embodies the soul of a festival where boundaries are fictitious, where identities recompose and mingle, indefinitely.

Official website / Facebook of the festival
Elisapie official website / Facebook / Instagram

By: Olivier Favier

Elisapie - Baloji

festivals - World music - African music - France - Canada - DRC

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