Paris (AFP)
The musical scenes function by cycle, and it is the turn of Saint-Etienne: Terrenoire, a duo of brothers, arrives with a captivating first album, preceding other singular Saint-Etienne voices.
Will follow Fils Cara, textual obsessed and electro-pop goldsmith (mini-album "Fictions" on September 4) or Zed Yun Pavarotti, meteor with a broken-down rap-song alloy (album "Beauseigne" on October 9).
In the meantime, here is "Forces contrary" by Terrenoire, ie Raphaël and Théo Herrerias, delivered this Friday (label Black Paradiso / Neuve). A first opus between beautiful family story and drama. Two years ago their father passed away.
"The album was created from this ordeal, on this trauma, everything resulted from it. One evening in November, two months after his death, we began to structure a musical thought to honor him", says Theo, the youngest, soon to be 24, met with his eldest thirty-something by AFP.
The album is not weighted so far and a beautiful light emerges. The theme of mourning - "what death does to the living" brush Raphaël - becomes poetry-electro on "The time to come back to life". And there are beautiful impulses, such as "Margot dansait sur moi".
- "On + hacke the real +" -
As they say in the industry, the two brothers are artist-entrepreneurs. They built their label and acquired their studio, mother planet at the service of Terrenoire and satellite orders, like film music.
"At the beginning, Black Paradiso was a kitsch neon of our imagination, now it's our company, we will see an accountant with this card, I tell myself that we + hack the real +, that we will end up waking up "Raphael laughs.
Their Parisian life does not erase Saint-Etienne. Terrenoire is the name of a popular district of the city of Forez. “It's a city full of human stories, stories of immigration, like our ancestors who came to work in the mine, in the steel industry, to blow glass, or in Manufrance, details Raphaël. Our father and all his brothers, the Spanish side of the family, lived next to Geoffroy-Guichard (legendary stadium for footballers in Saint-Etienne). Moreover, when football was very high, the city got wild ".
Between Terrenoire, Fils Cara and Zed Yun Pavarotti, there is a "common sensibility, even if it is not the same music, and a way of writing, a loop on an inhabited imagination, linked to the city", continues Raphael.
- "Truc which binds us" -
There is also a passage through Le Fil, a Saint Etienne room dedicated to contemporary music, an artistic residence for all these young shoots with computers - favorite instruments - fertile.
"The common point between them is that there is no border between hip-hop, electro, song and variety: no taboo, that's what surprised me the most", dissects for AFP Thierry Pilat, director of Le Fil. Zed Yun Pavarotti also explains to AFP that his work "is much more open on the side of song" than rap and admits an "influence of English pop".
All these artists from the same generation have known each other for a long time, which probably explains the lack of competition. "Terrenoire is more cerebral, Zed Yun more frontal", explains to AFP Fils Cara, who knows the second "since college". “Pop is something that binds us together, like this particular vocabulary that emanates from the industrial past,” he continues.
They will all be reunited - with other groups from Saint-Etienne, La Belle Vie, Coeur - on the bill for "L'ÉPOPée Verte" on October 3 at Le Fil in Saint-Etienne, an evening initially planned in Paris in April and postponed by the pandemic.
© 2020 AFP