Muddy Gurdy | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

"In the spring of 2017, Tia Gouttebel (vocals-guitar), Marco Glomeau (percussion) and Gilles Chabenat (hurdy-gurdy) went to record in North Mississippi, known as “the country of the hills”, where kudzu and a form of hypnotic blues once sung by Fred McDowell, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside. It is an initiatory journey as much as an ethical one. Ethical, because they don’t go there for tourist clichés. More for an exchange of cultures, a real meeting, inviting locals to share their music, recording in the field with a mobile studio. Mississippi musicians had never seen or heard a hurdy-gurdy before. But between people of the earth, because the Earth is round, we recognize each other, we understand each other. Initiatory, because this trip marks the birth certificate of Muddy Gurdy. The album is imbued with the magic of Mississippi. It was a favorite, a critical and commercial success, praised and broadcast as far as the United States. With this album, Muddy Gurdy tours a lot and attracts a new audience. In February 2020, just before the world stopped turning and planes flew, they were selected for the Folk Alliance festival in New Orleans, where they recorded a piece for the archives of the prestigious Library of Congress.

In Muddy Gurdy, there are always stories of correspondences, between territories, landscapes, times, places and people. In the Creole world, we speak of “péi music”. Muddy Gurdy invents his own “péi music”, his intimate and fertile crossovers. At this level of correspondences, we can speak of transcendence" (translated from Stéphane Deschamps)