To close its 27th edition, Fiest'à Sète offered a double dose of festive madness and generosity!

Caravan Palace ne délivre pas une simple performance mais un spectacle total, son et lumière pétaradant et euphorisant ! J.BE

The 27th edition of Fiest in Sète ended on Sunday evening with the incredible Franco-Japanese singer Maïa Barouh, with her syncretic pop, and the band Caravan Palace, an absolutely irresistible electro-swing machine on stage. A final “sold out” that proclaimed the festival's dual bet on the future and present: cross-breeding and partying!

The time has come to conclude. It's not easy, that, to conclude… When it's good, when it's sweet, when it's crazy, we would like it to never end. At the Théâtre de la Mer since July 30, the 27th edition of the world music festival, Fiest in Sète, has brought together fabulous evenings, each in a different musical color, each with its own particular nuance of emotion. It's about ending in style, in joy and good humor. This is exactly what will happen with Maïa Barouh and Caravan Palace.

A Franco-Japanese heroine

That said, in retrospect, the cancellation of Oumou Sangaré's concert the day before (the Malian diva suffered a fractured femur) was a blessing in disguise: a day of rest is not too much to resist, or rather, no, to abandon oneself completely to what is to follow! First, Maïa Barouh then.

Singer, flautist, author, composer and arranger, she is the daughter of Japanese painter Atsuko Ushioda and Pierre Barouh, creator of the Saravah label and talent scout (Jacques Higelin, Brigitte Fontaine, David McNeil, Allain Leprest, etc.). And as she sings from the outset, on a deep groove produced by her accomplices drummer and keyboards, skull-gnawing hit for mixed-bloods: “I am half like you and half not you, one foot here the other not far from China. I give voice and sometimes I bark. The queen of the bastards, I am the queen… Because I am hafu!”

Everything about her proclaims this mixed and dual nature: a frank Eurasian beauty with cyberfun makeup, Maïa Barouh is dressed in an open kimono whose bottom, in strips, reveals fishnets and platform boots; on her wrists large fluorescent bracelets… and in her hands a transverse flute from which she draws here crystalline notes of Western influence, there vocal percussions of Eastern inspiration.

His singing is no less hybrid, borrowing from French song, French and English rap, J-pop and the ancestral vocal tradition of the Amami Islands, all in glottal stops… The song ChinXoise is yet another opportunity for her to slice through exotic clichés with a katana and, between passages rapped in Japanese, to invite the short-sighted to go “eat their dead”.

Subcranial and suburban

Ultra-modern heiress of a pop counterculture that goes from Rita Mitsouko to Bjork, via Meiko Kaji, Nina Hagen, Prince and the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Maïa Barouh never ceases to surprise; and this, without ever losing us. Charismatic and funny, she takes us by the hand to make us discover her underground as much subcranial as suburban.

We discover that sushis know how to dance. We meet the alter-globalist accordionist Fixi. We see Maïa go down into the pit to waltz with the audience. A guitarist emerges from the stands for a well-executed electro-solo. We are both speechless and astounded when Maïa Barouh offers herself a long solo on the flute during which she does not only blow, sing and scatter at the same time: she has certainly cast a spell on us, we are screwed, no point in resisting, we succumb.

A dancefloor steamroller

When, after having refreshed their ideas and having tried in vain to regain their senses, Caravan Palace enters the scene, we understand that in the end, it is not so bad that we did not get our hands on it again: it is not to them that the music of the Parisian group is addressed, but to our kidneys, our chops, our buttocks, our feet, our arms, our shoulders, our hands, our ears, our lips, in short to everything that can move in our body…

Moreover, the day after this dancefloor release, small new pains signal to us that unsuspected parts of our body have also been moved. Did you know that ventricles could also dance?

In the meantime, we admire the demonic effectiveness of the electro-swing of Caravan Palace, cousin to that of Parov Stelar (and that of Gramophonedzie, we whisper -we gently in our ear before humming a little of Why don’t you do right ; good precision, good question). If the programming abounds, the six musicians are sufficiently deep (and good!) in each of their interventions, so that we see that fire ! And the singer Zoé Colotis doesn't hold back and regularly throws party gasoline on the burning bodies in the Théâtre de la Mer. A famous bonfire! The cover of Black Betty, popularized by Ram Jam, is so incendiary that it must be visible from the International Space Station.

A miraculous backdrop

Since we're talking about stars, we have to talk about Cavan Palace's backdrop screen: an LED wall that can here accommodate a crystal-clear prompt (“Celebrate”), there we flash at an unreasonable heart rate or appear as if just now a celestial vault. In this magnificent starry decor which adds to the constellations which sparkle in the eyes of each one, a baritone saxophone takes center stage and coos a melody, Midnight, the time for hearts to grow bolder… and for Zoé Colotis to change her outfit (she will do it again once, Pretty naughty girl) ! The next piece, admit that it is well done, is called Miracle, and does what it promises us: it widens the smiles that now come very slightly after the ears; we almost open like the lid of a coffee pot (which would not be so bad: we told you, the spirits have fled!).