Brama Does Psychedelic Rock with a Hurdy Gurdy
Our record of the month is the first LP from the Occitan psychedelic rock combo Brama
After a significant absence from your mailboxes, I Only Listen to French Music is back! Let’s hope for good, once I’ll stop worrying about my professional future. But I couldn’t let you live your life without telling you about the formidable first LP from Brama, a rural trio mixing psychedelic influences with their traditional music roots. Once again, it’s a band singing in Occitan. This time, the music showcases a peculiar instrument called the hurdy gurdy.
What the hell is a hurdy gurdy?
In French, we called the instrument une vielle à roue* which you could roughly translate “a wheel fiddle”. I don’t really know what makes a gurdy hurdy but there’s no simple gurdy. Just like the shorten word vielle* only means “a vielle with a wheel”.
The hurdy gurdy is a string instrument of unclear origins that can be found in most of the Middle-East and Europe. The wheel in question is acting like the bow of a violin but melodies are played with your left hand on a keyboard changing the position of the chords on the wheel. But the main particularity is through the cranking motion you’re making to turn the wheel, like a barrel organ. Some hurdy gurdies, like the one from France’s Yann Gourdon, have been motorized. Watch out : here, I’m talking about France the band and not France the country. France is a French trio playing long-form drones. Because you have two types of strings on the hurdy gurdy: melodic ones and drone ones to accompany the melodies with a constant sound. The sound, quite strident, can be similar to bagpipes.
France, the country, has a bunch of famous hurdy gurdist like folk legend Emmanuelle Parrenin or Sourdure’s Ernest Bergez. Outside of France, you’ll be happy to learn that both Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Arcade Fire’s Regine Chassagne are famous hurdy gurdists. You can also hear a hurdy gurdy on Black Sails’ soundtrack composed by Bear McCreary. I love this show. And of course, a handful of neofolk or metal bands like Alestorm ot Faun have embraced the instrument to produce a middle-age vibe.
Frenchsplaining Brama
Brama is a band based in Corrèze. I already talked about Corrèze in the post about San Salvador, an Occitan choir. There’s a long explanation over there but it’s basically a very rural region at the center of France. They now live in Clermont-Ferrand, the biggest city in our central mountain range.
Brama was a trio but is now a quartet with two new members. Even though you can still hear former member Baptiste Lherbeil at the hurdy-gurdy on the new record, you might know their new hurdy gurdist, Amandine Pauvert, from this video from videographer team Petites Planètes (Vincent Moon and Priscilla Telmon). Coming from the traditional ball scene, she’s also a member of the Brayauds collective (I bet I’ll talk about it on the future).
“Brama” is the Occitan verb for the bellowing of the stag. The name comes from Marcelle Delpastre, a rural poet from the same region. Inspired by Anglo rock, Pakistani trance music and their own Occitan culture, Brama strongly believe on Pete Seeger’s stance against the “Coca-Colonization” of music. You can listen to them talk about their post-modernist approach to music composition in the Planète Ocora podcast (it’s in French).
For their lyrics, they are working with Dominique Decomps, a 72-year old translator and author also doubling as the band main lyricist because most of the their songs are originating from her poems. I think it’s cute.
Brama is our French record of the month
Brama have released their eponymous first album after only one long EP. Yes, La Glane is only 8-minute shorter than Brama, which is classified as a LP. We need a Memorandum of Understanding on what constitutes an EP, please. Nevertheless, thanks to the LP format it’s fairly easy to identify the two best songs of the record : the two 8-minute odysseys closing each face of the record.
S’enraija [trad: to enrage] begins with a reverbed hurdy-gurdy ballad slowly adding a vocal lament about forests and mountains. Then after a 3-minute introduction, Brama is going full force into their funkiest song. Paolo Gauthier is drumming really hard on this one. With the choir, the ending is as grandiose as the intro was quiet.
La Baga d’Or [trad: Golden ring] is another mood altogether. The song sounds like The Beatles in their Revolver-era, with the guitarist Simon Guy finger-picking his acoustic guitar plus a goddam rock ‘n’ roll solo from the hurdy gurdy. You might think the music from Brama is supposed to be heavier than that but who cares: it’s excellent.
The rest of the songs are also very good but nothing stands out more than those two. A special mention to the Onte Anar [trad: Where to go], an hysterical pop song where they are doing a lot of fun stuff with the vocals and the guitar.
Brama is an effective rock album going from pastoral to noisy in matter of seconds. There’s something peculiar about it. I don’t know if it’s the use of modal composition or Occitan sung with gusto by Simon Guy or the presence of a hurdy gurdy as a rock instrument. It was produced by Johannes Buff and Pierre Loustaunau (aka Petit Fantôme, a great musician) in their studio Shorebreaker, near the Basque country, where they already recorded a bunch of cool bands. It sounds great.
Psychedelic music knows no borders. That’s why we listen to Turkish, Cambodian, Japanese or Nigerian psychedelic music all the time. I’m glad we finally have a full-fledged Occitan psychedelic band. Brama should play in every festival.
The Year in Hurdy Gurdy
Sooner or later, I was bound to talk about hurdy gurdy. At the end of September, I saw the crazy concert of Yann Gourdon, playing the hurdy gurdy through a whole bunch of effects, against the minimalist percussions of Alexis Degrenier - himself a former hurdy gurdy player in the supergroup La Tène. The concert, organized in the framework of Murailles Music’s 20 years anniversary was loud and cathartic. Murailles Music is a record/touring/production company specialized in experimental and rock music. These past few years, they’ve been working a lot with traditional musicians. I’ve interviewed Julien Courquin, their art director, over here (still in French sorry).
And let’s not forget about Strasbourg-based Lise Barkas who released, also in September, an excellent experimental and instrumental tape with hurdy gurdy AND bagpipes. Called Cinq Ponts [trad: Five Bridges]. Her music is haunting and beautiful. The recording - by my boy d’incise - is so precise that even the gentle taping of her fingers on the old mechanism becomes part of the music. One of the best music piece of this year but I’m saving Lise Barkas for an article later, maybe an interview.