Futuristic French duo Turfu release their brand new single ‘Astrale Nouba’ featuring the vocals of award-winning Scottish folk artist Kate Young – out now via Airfono. Turfu are Matthieu Souchet (LoG, XAMAN, Science Fiction) on drums and synth and Raphaël Decoster (Zlabya, Kate and Raphaël) on accordion. With disconcerting simplicity, the pair present a daring mix of dancing accordion rhythms alongside the abstract repetitions of electro. Working with long techno crescendos, dissonant squeeze box sounds, and the birthing of confused emotions, these young musicians move between dance hall and club, in a hypnotic trance, which is simultaneously gritty and uplifting. Souchet and Decoster’s common goal is to get people dancing and in the party mood! DMCWORLD decided it was time to jump in and grab a glimpse of their crazy life…
Matthieu Souchet, Raphaël Decoster aka TURFU – a huge welcome to DMCWORLD!! Let’s set the scene to begin…where are you both in the world and what did you have for breakfast?
We are living in two different countries, but it never has been problematic as we love to travel anyway. Matthieu is near Paris and I live in Porto, Portugal. It’s kind of refreshing to have this double culture and these two different realities.
How did you two meet and when did you decide to start working together as artists?
We met in Portugal some years ago, in a folk music gathering called Ethno. It took us a little while but a few years later we played our first gig again in the exact same place. So, it was quite symbolic to be on the same stage, with this brand new project. We are not exactly playing folk music, so we really didn’t know how the public would react. Fortunately, it was a big success, and we closed the festival with a huge party. That night Turfu was born, and it quickly became our main project, even if we both already worked as musicians before.
What artists inspiredyour musical development growing up and who are the contemporary artists and bands you like at the moment?
We both received an acoustic music education (Matthieu in Jazz, Raphael in folk music) but with strong feelings for electronic music since we are pretty young. A lot of artists we listen to are actually playing with those 2 ingredients. Blurring borders between specific genres is something that interests and inspires us. Only to give a few names, artists who are feeding us musically at the moment are : Rone, Odezenne, Flavien Berger, Brand Brauer Frick, Ok lou, Dombrance, Thom Yorke, M.I.A, Amar 808, Yolande Bashing…
Congratulations on the release of your latest single ‘Astrale Nouba’. Tell us about the track…
The story of the actual song (Bulgarian traditional song) is about a son asking his mother for permission to get married. It’s a really classical folky thematic, but we didn’t want to get too attached to the meaning of it. For us this song is more about how we can create a new environment for traditional and electronic music to coexist in a funny, self derisory and creative way. We developed a brand new story and aesthetic around it, where Kate is a shamamic priestess transforming voguing dancers into Llamas.
GET THE SINGLE HERE: Astrale nouba (fanlink.to)
How did the collaboration with Scottish folk singer Kate Young come about?
I’ve known Kate Young for some years now, we even had a band together and we played in a lot of European festivals. We also met in Ethno, traveling around and playing our own kind of folk music. In 2019 we played in a small festival in Northumberland, where we got booked with both Turfu and Kate and Raphael. This is when we started to jam with Kate on stage, and when we got the idea to invite her on our album. She is a very dear friend and a super talented musician, so I hope to keep playing with her forever!
The video for ‘Astrale Nouba’ is wonderfully surreal. Where did you get the idea for it and what does it represent? And why so many llamas???????????
We wanted to work with the director Alexandre Regol who already did a music video for us (Espace Fraicheur). The idea was to start from a rural esthetic and then give it a twist. We thought about mountain animals, but we didn’t want to use goats. It’s a very symbolic animal used in a lot of folk traditions so it would have been too obvious. Same for the dancers : we use some folk and shamanic references in the costumes, but the voguing style brings something more urban that contrasts with the natural scenery. This is kind of a reflection of the Turfu project. We use ancient sounds and references to create something new, some kind of futuristic folk culture. In this track it is the first time we use an actual traditional song. We wanted to show a different interpretation of it, musically and visually, while respecting its roots.
Tell us about the new album, also called ‘Astrale Nouba’…
Yes we just released our first album ! This is always an important moment in any band process, I guess. First because you can finally share the work of the past months/years, but also because you immortalise your music at a certain time, which makes you able to move forward in your creativity. Some tracks sound already different when we play them live now, but at least we have this object that is here to remind us the emotion of each tune when we were recording it. Making an album is also a good opportunity to invite friends to play with you on the record, and this is what we did with the three guests Kate Young, Pierre Tereygeol and Gino Groenveld.
Your live shows famously resemble a DJ set; tracks merge and there’s no breaks. Was this a conscious decision to do it this way or did it evolve naturally?
We noticed that when you want to keep the energy of the dance going, it’s better not to stop between each track. But for us it’s also important to have interaction with the audience, so we wouldn’t do an entire live without a break. It’s important to adapt to each audience. If it’s a huge festival and people just want to party, you have to give them what they want. If it’s a more intimate vibe and you feel like there is space for talking, getting to know each other, you have to do it as well.
Your stage performanceshave an ‘interactive dimension’ with cool visuals by Kasper Ravel. Tell us more…
We wanted to bring our live to another level of interaction, especially on the dance side. With Kaspar’s installation, the audience is filmed and directly projected on the stage. The image is glitched and transformed, and reacts to the audience movements. So the idea is to create a dialog between the audience and what’s visually happening on stage. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic we didn’t use it as much as we wanted yet. But the few times it happened we could really see the audience having fun with it, and being pushed to create new dance moves.
And finally, what can we expect from you in the near future? Now that lockdown is set to ease, any tours planned?
We have got a summer tour planned, but as last year it’s probably not going to happen. Anyway, as we just released our album, we are now working on different music videos, to illustrate each track and bring some new stories and visuals to it. It’s quite a different job from being on stage, but we love it too!
