La Grande Folie

It's been a long time coming – since school days, one could say – and the speakers positively burst with a sense of pent-up vitality in the first few furious bars of ‘Fai Sautar’. These six friends and siblings from the tiny village of Saint-Salvadour in la Franceprofonde have been captivating festival audiences for several years with their thrilling brand of a cappella polyphonic choral music. The album takes its title from a folkloric tradition of the Massif Central and the number that often concludes their act. There are four long tracks, like the astounding ‘La Liseta’, that twist and turn and build into the kind of trance-like state experienced when listening to someone like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Without the four shorter numbers that offer some breathing space, it might all be too rich – and plain draining – to ingest in one sitting.

Their methodology is encapsulated in that first concise opener: the harmonies, the hand-clapping, the battering of drums, the onomatopoeic circular improvisations around single phrases, often sung in their own adapted Occitan dialect, all welling up into a frenzy of vocal energy. I defy anyone to listen to this album without so much as a frisson. Astonishing stuff.