This article retraces, via captain logs, the encounter of French band Fuzeta by ZeBoss aka as the founder of Radio Kaos Caribou #RKC who sums up the experience as:
‘Where the incredible sonic trip of your ears, heart, soul, or simply of you begins, leading to the country of the quasi automatic eargasm.’
ZeBoSS’s Logbook in the year III after #RKC
Lorient – May 24th, 2015 02:00 AM: My eyes firmly fixed on the pictures recorded the day before during FUZETA’s release party in the warm shrine of the MAPL / Le Manège / Les Studios – Lorient, I watch over and over in Super8 technicolor the musical film of the past months, the deep furrow left by the gang of this great adventure Ricard S.A Live Music. They came out from it as winners in early 2015, after being the most popular band of the last Transmusicales of Rennes (last fall).
Then, pictures, sounds, words, acts are colliding, born once more in the magic cauldron of every human potential and musical meeting: Twitter.
#RKC HQ, #Ermont – France – Nov 6th, 2014 (Where ZeBoSS came upon Plage…): A day of radio and promotion which could have only been one among others. Until Efflorescence Culturelle blog published and shared this link http://www.efflorescenceculturelle.com/…/f-u-z-e-t-a-rendr…/
It fell upon our eyes and the click to follow changed everything. A simple share turned into a meeting, then became the exploratory visit of a musical saga… It all began when we listened to the first track…
…a French title, written in an English so mastered it enchants and thrills our Rockpraising spines, that their three-voice choir sings from their guts. It’s a vibrant call to share a tribal (yet obviously universal) wave and thrills we may sometimes think are forgotten and lost.
Their voices don’t smash you. They don’t have a wild impact on you. Neither do they have blasts ready to hit you straight in the heart leaving questioning bruises, bruises that would have no other purpose than to catch you easily, with bright eyes staring straight at you as an angry shout.
No, these three voices are wrapping you kindly, then they take you by the hand. These voices are friends, buddies. It’s something always youthful, too often swept aside by our adult lives as if it were useless. Their music supports friendship, a deeply human feeling, and values of a disarming, as endearing, simple and dizzying as an inspiring state of mind.
Listening to FUZETA is listening to a life, relieved. Not peaceful but relieved.
It’s not that sadness, anger, and other emotional colours are missing from their music, from their text. No, they are there, but mastered, canalised… and furthermore…
To canalise is to gather in order to offer superior strength. And strength, FUZETA do have it, even if at first sight they might seem soft or civilised.
‘The Right Sound To The Right People At The Right Time’
A song that comes at the right time in a Radio’s life, is a good slap to get it back on track, to tell ourselves that there definitely are artists, men and women to defend and support; to finally know that our work means something, and so does our fight to defend the #indies, not only in music but in the same crucible that makes, in the end, one whole.
Only the coherence of our choices as citizens of this world. And coherent, they really are.
Yes, FUZETA is a whole. It’s an ingenious arrangement, brilliantly shaped first by Mother Nature, then by their human mind. It’s also a permanent visual artwork, made of the obsolete colours of an AGFA picture but whose ingenious and invigorating vitality is an open window on us.
Almost everything is said about those four boys’ musical work. From, necessarily, laudatory references to uncountable and illustrated descriptions, words are always close to the ones boasting the happiness of whomever it’s addressed to.
The only comparison that comes to my mind in 2015 is with The Electric Discharge Machine. However, where the Franco-Liverpuldian quartet, always dressed as nasty kids preparing some bad moves, with such deep and obvious roughness you can’t do anything but keep on listening, grinning from musical joy like an idiot, where also, under their bad boy looks, writing sensitive poetry, they play their ‘declaration of war’ with a wild, released, assumed and claimed enthusiasm (though is it not what we expect from them ?), FUZETA, on the contrary, plays the card of a particular and desired Morbihan tranquillity, or the one given away by the eponymous Portuguese harbour, a mere memory turned into a poetical banner.
This tranquillity is at first based on the constant oneiric aspect of their sonic shores, spelled one by one in a few notes. From this moment, they are immersed in the marine early sweetness, they give us a natural music, ancestral ruin from before the first humans, compared to which our lives are nothing but a tear in their timescale.
These musical coasts, usually ripped by winds full of sharp riffs and swept away by fuzzy waves, are deceptively quiet. Underneath, a storm is brewing.
And when it finally thunders, releasing so many expected and almost redeeming sea sprayed decibels, a rosace of winds takes place naturally, from which arisculminate in four cardinal points, Charles, Dorian, Pierre and Jérémy, showing us the way, theirs, ours, to run alongside together.
Up north, is Jérémy the metronomic coxswain, tireless batsman focused on his work. The stroke is assured and wisely counted . There’s no coast he can’t make their odyssey reach, as fast as wind.
West, are Charles and Lady Bass. Skilled companion of his 4 strings, he makes her dance, hand to strings in wide and closer moves. They cuddle in a loving tango full of gliding and caressing movements, unique and touching. ‘Born’ of a forgotten and lost world, where the silence is first respect rather than an absence and notes are more like gifts to his playmates. He’s the one waiting for the last person, ensuring everyone reaches the port, never leaving anyone behind.
East, is Pierre, heavenly guitaristic gunner. He’s the one who makes the thunder roar. When they have to get on stage, against the wind, he’s the first to challenge it, his instrument in hand as a shield. He gives into energy, sets his note plainly. There is no possible capitulation here: in the East, the The Old Guard dies but never surrenders.
Down South, is Dorian, solar and radiant without shadowing anyone. He’s the captain, poet, mischievous pirate, chosen by his peers in cloudy seas, although he has the gift to calm them down before releasing and letting go their ingenious natural strengths forged by and within the four of them.
But talking about FUZETA only in a musical way will make you miss their essence.
The human beings composing this quartet are simply at the level of their music. Or is it the opposite?
Their heart, soul and music sealed a wonderful and interlinked partnership. This mischievous quartet doesn’t lay scars or heartbreaks bare in a teasing and flashy staging, but life at its best. There’s all of that in their songs: birth, life and death.
‘And we’re coming out from it a different person’
ZeBoSS’s Logbook in the year III after #RKC
#RKC HQ – May 26th, 2015 05.41 AM : Emotions got to me. It’s with eyes full of human joyful tears that I’m writing these few concluding words.
Putting all that in prose obviouslyoverwhelms me. Dragging this text out of me finally allows me to appreciate what the others are able to pull out as good things and offer you, without any other expectation than your happiness and touching you, directly of course.
This is what it feels like to experiment FUZETA, musically and humanly and more.
It’s a real experiment… Yours… Unique… Alive… Emotionally strong… Your life.
Then, after reading this, stand up. If you could go and find the ones you love, tell them how much you love them. You could also share/listen their EP ‘Dive’ together without a word.
What’s Next for Fuzeta?
Since then, FUZETA have been travelling tirelessly through France, from Les Francofolies in La Rochelle, full of acoustic experiments in marvellous and original places, to the Fnac Live event at Hôtel de Ville, Paris.
The professional dimension of their saga became a serious deal, thanks to the involvement of BMG and of a serial booker. Yet, we can be sure their adventure will go on under their original and sonic colours, because only those four boys can create some FUZETA.
It’s also clear now, watching them turning France into their own playground, discovering them happier and happier to play anywhere for you. No matter where they go, they will surely give out condensed musical happiness, smiling blissfully. There’s no doubt left, such is FUZETA within the French musical landscape.
Listening to their music is an obvious need you can satisfy via the EP, available on Bandcamp:
https://wearefuzeta.bandcamp.com/
A big thank you to the MAPL / Le Manège / Les Studios – Lorient – #BiGuP Anne Jérémie & The 56 Fam’
Editor’s note: This article writen by ZeBoss (to be read as The Boss in a French accent 😉 ) was first published in French at https://www.facebook.com/RadioKC/posts/684972458274421:0 as the concluding notes of a marvellous trip through the lands of Morbihan. Original French to English: Clémence Grousset; Re-edition: 1InMusic
Fuzeta – photo credit @indiemusicfr – Fred Lombard
