Groningen (Netherlands) (AFP)
During Eurosonic, a pioneer festival in Groningen (Netherlands), you can quickly spot their silhouettes over the rooms scattered in the old city center: the programmers of other scenes of current music came to find the nuggets.
The meeting is "ideally located in mid-January, after the truce of the confectioners it's back to business, we have + booked + the headliners and we come to look for European discoveries here" explains AFP Kem Lalot, programmer of the Eurockéennes de Belfort, in the west of France.
With nearly 350 groups / artists in four days, the programmers do not stay long before a show. Despite their incessant strolls in the fine rain of Groningen and in the rooms, they return however to the radars: lumberjack beard and US style cap for Kem Lalot, flashy cap and long curly hair for Ségolène Favre Cooper, programmer of the MaMA festival in Paris , white mop and glasses with blue uprights for Jean-Louis Brossard, patron of the influential Trans Musicales of Rennes.
The tempo is therefore ultra-fast. "After two songs, the group can hang on to you, but even if you're hooked, there are so many things in front ... it's a continuous zapping, describes Kem Lalot. I very rarely stay at a concert in full, except at the end of the day because I have my boots full (laughs), but otherwise, it's 10, 20 minutes. "
- "See a maximum" -
"We are here to try to see as much as possible, the idea is not to judge the entire concert but to see if it takes with the audience, even if sometimes you get caught and you do not move then that you were gone to stay ten minutes ", tells AFP Ségolène Favre Cooper.
In the concert swallowing machine category, Jean-Louis Brossard is there. "Yesterday I saw more than twenty groups, including four unfortunately scheduled at the same time, but I managed to see them, I was happy!" He said to AFP in the middle day at a record store in front of a mini-concert demonstration (most of the programming takes place between 8:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m.). We also saw him stop his crazy race to enjoy the late night set of DC Salas, a DJ who went through the Trans this winter.
Because the boss of the Trans also likes to go see his "babies", these newcomers that he has already scheduled for the past year, to see "how it goes with the public, if there are people, if the people are hooked, that's what I like. "
Even if he remains focused on fishing for rare pearls. "I'm starting my programming for the next Trans, I won't say the name, but I + booked + an artist yesterday", he lets go between two puffs of cigarettes.
- "I ask for the + excluded +" -
"From Eurosonic, I bring back at least three groups each year, but it can go beyond that," also explains Kem Lalot.
Is there a researcher Yalta to avoid head-on competition? "We all know each other, we exchange a lot between French and Europeans, to try to work constructively, because if we are all on the same dates it only inflates prices," summarizes Kem Lalot.
"Not me!" Replied Jean-Louis Brossard frankly. "Me, I ask the + excluded +. After that, a lot of programmers walk around together, but they don't do the same thing as me". This does not prevent the camaraderie: "Yesterday, I finished the evening very late with some of them".
"At MaMA, we are on young guard, it's a bit of a common line with Jean-Louis, we sometimes fight - in quotes - for an artist or a group, but that's good, and I know that he likes it, it makes him emulation, it was he who told me, "smiles Ségolène Favre Cooper.
© 2020 AFP