Adorcist & Post-Industrial ritual.
Spirits, Possession & Trance.
Senegal.

Ndox Electrique is a ritual of possession coming from the n’döep ceremonies in Senegal.

It’s wild, it’s dark and solar, it's feminine and powerful, groovingly calling the spirits

to heal the modern world with traditionnal incantations, dances & percussions,

electric guitars & computers. On stage, healing mistresses & musicians make a pact

with the Spirits : it takes much more than good intentions but dancing sweat

and a consistent volume to achieve salvation through music & trance.

World music in the West is most often formatted & presented as fancy & innocent

postcards: the sun, the dunes, the smiles, the welcome, the attaya or the ceebu jën

offered to the lovely toubabs, etc.  However the music of the cruel, wild, frenzied,

real and even bloodthirsty worlds betrays that neo-colonialist postcard presentation.

To cast out the demons during a n'döep ceremonie among the Lebous

of Senegal, it will take music & songs of a huge volume to reach the elevation

of the trance, and sweat & blood to sanctify the action and to satisfy the spirits.

Rituals of incredible loudness and musical violence for a spirituality

coupled with a magnificent and imperious social role during liturgies

where Western griots like Meshuggah or The Birthday Party

would only be considered as well-educated choir boys. 

(The volume of N'döep is so huge that its singers nowadays

use megaphones.)

People around the world have always felt the need to transcend

their fears of life and death, to rise above their misfortunes and terrors.

Now it’s about time to destroy, immolate your own music and annihilate

your cultural influences by the power of other songs, melodies, chants, other rhythms, other sweats of trance and elevation.

Breaking everything in turn, then reshaping the materials, respectfully iconoclastic to become what music really is when it is no longer commercial: a wind, little or nothing but a wild and cathartic emotion.

Still working from years with Ifriqiyya Electrique, François R. Cambuzat and Gianna Greco (from the seminal Putan Club) could not find out where the North African adorcist communities, such banga, stambeli, diwân or gnawa, came from. Of the Arab-Muslim slave route, that was certain, but from which country, from which region? The traces seemed lost. Research after research, little by little this five-century-old road led them to West Africa, Senegal and the Lebu's n'döep. For months in Mbour, Guereo, Rufisque, Yoff and Ndar (Saint-Louis), François R. Cambuzat and Gianna Greco got lost among the seas and banks of Senegal, sacrificing to spirits -most often aquatic- ndox, water, in the Wolof language.

Tëdd ak Mame Coumba Lamba ak Mame Coumba Mbang: lying between Mame Coumba Lamba and Mame Coumba Mbang, the female geniuses of a tiny part of a huge continent. And so the title of the futur album, to be released by Bongo Joe Records on the 3rd of November 2023 (BJR 089).

Order

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Vinyle / CD / Digital

Rituals

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First rituals in the West:
12/11 - LE GUESS WHO? Festival, Utrecht [NL]

07/12 - Festival TRANS MUSICALES, Rennes [F]

First Western tour: June-December 2024