COCANHA
Flame Folclòre (Bongo Joe)
The Celtic people of the UK and Ireland enjoy a linguistic bond with France’s Brittany region, whose Breton language shares roots with their own indigenous tongues, and this is undergirded by the various histories of subjugation endured by speakers of each. To this end, that solidarity should be extended to the Occitans, who are mainly from southern France (though also found around the Italian and Spanish borders) and have been subject to degrees of discrimination from the republic effectively since the French Revolution.
A healthy, defiant folk music culture has prevailed through all this, with performers singing in Occitan for the Occitans, and that’s where Toulouse duo Cocanha are coming from on their third album. If Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse are drawing on trad folk for Flame Folclòre, though, they’re not playing it, at least not with suffocating authenticity. Produced by Barcelona’s broad-horizoned Raül Refree, Cocanha’s base ingredients of harmonised vocals and percussive string instruments are elevated by his studio alchemy.
And yet these songs still sound oven-ready for Dufau and Fraysse to rattle them out in some rustic tavern or ivy-covered courtyard with minimal or no amplification. The strings and handdrums are raw and lo-fi in a way that reminds me of Ghanaian kologo music, while the duo’s moments of quicksharp call-and-response shouted vocals could be a nod to the late Aby Ngana Diop, a Senegalese griot of renown. Anthropologically speaking, it’s also interesting to hear numbers like Au Nòst’ Casalòt – a 19th-century song from the Gascony region – and ponder its apparent Irish folk cadence, although everyone who sings something like probably does so differently.
words NOEL GARDNER
