OH GOSH where to start with this guy – his experimental folk using home made instruments and use of the old Occitan language of Auvergne, France are a TOTAL TRIP- unlike much else we have heard to be honest! His albums are all so different from eachother – recent shows seem to be using a swingy around the head rope/wire/lead thingy that occilates up and down whilst he sings in his beautiful singular voice .
An artist based in Thiers (63), Ernest Bergez, aka Sourdure, has been exploring the boundaries of distant sound worlds for the past ten years, combining a spirit of experimentation with a personal, hand-crafted approach to traditional musical objects. Hybrid and exploratory, Sourdure‘s music reveals itself in many facets: baroque inventions on traditional canvas, vociferous carnivalesque odes, stylistic borrowings from oriental music, sonic orfevrery marked by concrete music… Combined with the acoustic rusticity of the violin or the dotar (a Central Asian lute), electronics do their alchemical work, disturbing sound objects, altering perceptions and the course of time.
Whether exalted or bittersweet, the vocals borrow from the voices of classical Arabic, Turkish or Persian music. The Occitan language of Auvergne takes centre stage, deploying its metaphorical and polysemous mesh to express the common, the intimate and the sacred. The melody is born from the word, the poem gives birth to the song, in a form that could be distantly reminiscent of trobar, the art of the troubadours. A one-man orchestra, a single man playing from a universe of orchestras, Sourdure sings like the nose on your face.