Wooo, this two-track live album from French instrumental duo Cantenac Dagar is straight off the bone, with no overdubs or studio trickery marring its sizzling sincerity.
The crank-handled smack of those beats rupture a refreshing rawness on “Saique”, all dirty’n’distorted stepping into this abrasive banjo shadow. A gnarly screechy beast bowed by Stéphane Barascud taking a coarse grain sandpaper to John Cale’s voila treatment of Nico’s Marble Index and then some more.
Whizzy in hypnotising hiss-o-loics, its repetitive drag is a defining constant to the corroded beatbox echo of his fellow combatant Aymeric Hainaux. The sound is all pedal-pushed, and fluid leaking messily over into football cheering. Mooching a reverbed whip-clap and dagger-dubbed vocals until those eager rhythmics reach an electrocuted crescendo, finally burning back in slippery psychedelics. The flipside “Seleau” oozes a syrupy contrast. A country-shunted shimmer in vaporous chorals and splashy pads, its chugging undercoat floated over by a ghostly mouth organ spiked in distorted returns. A Ennio Moriconne maul that sucks at you, its delay-heavy architectures grinding in soupy serration, a curving colossus of needling red that corrodes in your ear in grainy smears, folding in on brief applause and foreign-language announcement before scouring a misshapen sayonara.Seseuda is an unexpected treat for the ears that injects a much needed live experience to these covid-wrecked times.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
