312: La Grande Folie, by San Salvador

San Salvador (France)
La Grande Folie (2015)
4 tracks, 26 minutes
Bandcamp
This is the only real release that San Salvador have made, and it’s an EP. I’ll also recommend you take a listen to Choeur Populaire – Massif Central, a four-track live recording from 2016 EP – it’s available to listen on Soundcloud, and the two sets only double-up with one song, so if you put them back-to-back you’re even getting near album length, huzzah!

So, about the band themselves. Well, sometimes – and I know it’s very hard to believe, but it’s true – sometimes, I’m wrong. Shocking, right? But I am. The first time I heard San Salvador was about a year ago at WOMEX in Gran Canaria. Their write-up in the programme sounded vaguely interesting – voice and drum music from the Occitan region of France – but when I saw them, it left me completely cold. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that the sound system was incredibly loud, to a painful degree, or maybe I just wasn’t feeling it. I left before long.

Thing is, afterwards, almost everyone I talked to was raving about them, to the degree that they sounded like one of the successes of the event. I was baffled, but okay. They must have heard something I didn’t. Then the next summer rolled around, and San Salvador were scheduled to play at WOMAD, and on one of the biggest stages, the Siam Stage, too. I thought they would surely not be able to command a stage that large, but I decided to check them out nonetheless, remembering the hype that followed their show last time.

It was jaw-dropping. I finally heard what everyone else did and I’m so glad. They are just six voices – three men and three women – who between them play two floor tom drums, a tambourine, a small pair of cymbals and lots of handclapping, but it’s completely gripping. These young musicians have taken a polyphonic tradition that is often dour and usually performed with austere expressions and turned it into something electrifying by the sheer weight of their performance. The music itself is still largely traditional, but there is such an energy to San Salvador that brings it fully to life, whether their voices are skipping and jumping in and around each other, creating interlocking melodies, singing in complex harmony or thrashing out thundering polyrhythms with palm, drumstick and cymbal. Performed live, their pieces are very long – I think they only managed to fit in five or six over their hour-and-a-quarter set – and it allows them to develop themes and motifs slowly, create a slowly evolving shape and to refer back to earlier material throughout. It is an amazing live show, and it left the WOMAD audience (and myself) completely entranced. One of the top highlights of this year’s festival.

I was wrong. The crowd had it right at WOMEX: San Salvador change the game for Occitan music. The recordings that they do have, such as this EP, give a glimpse of what they can do, but don’t quite capture the raw energy of their live show, so let’s all hope that there’s an album on the way soon that will explode out of the speakers just as the band do on stage. The most important thing is to give artists second chances – you may never know what you’re missing otherwise.