More than two years after the massive EP1, the Réunionnais of PANGAR announce a first album with a mixtape of dark electronic polyrhythms, coupled with a disturbing video. Interview.
« PANGAR is coming back »hammers the intro of Position, this mixtape that announces the return of Kwalud and Betnwaar that we were waiting for. After the slap struck by the brutal EP1, we nevertheless turned the other cheek, but that was without counting on the Covid. Halfway between the energy of their island and a parallel world that can be imagined as underground, dystopian or beyond, the duo pushes their adopted Creole culture to the extreme in this mixtape of 45 minutes in the form of a catch-up session. This salvo of experimental polyrhythms in the eardrums and this tense video in the eyes, we wanted to know more about this cinematic approach, which also opens the doors to a first album.
Why this silence of more than two years after theEP1 ?
We’re not going to lie to each other, we took the health crisis in the face, it happened just after the release of theEP1 of InFiné. We weren’t able to start defending our project on stage outside Reunion until last May, with a first date at the Nuits Sonores in Lyon. In many ways, this mixtape is a Covid baby… We didn’t make the virus, we promise! We have nevertheless released in the meantime two original tracks for the labels Nyege Nyege Tapes and Blanc Manioc, and a remix in collaboration with the Mahoran group Sarera, for a beautiful album released on vinyl and carried by the collective Kayamba and Blanc Manioc, You don’t live.
Is this mixtape a way to get you back in the saddle? In what context was it created?
We are a fan of hybrid formats, soundtracks that offer a universe a little bigger than each of the pieces that compose them, that tell a story. The mixtape allows this gesture, that of mixing, mixing, being struck by the materials and sound documents accumulated over the past two years. This mixtape stages part of the music proposed in the album of the same name to be released on May 5, inscribes it in an augmented imagination, inhabited by the benevolent shadow and the voices of some figures of Creole, Caribbean like the Indian Ocean. And also, we admit, we really wanted to make a K7.
What did you want to say in this clip?
The video brings together 3 films made in a single day by long-time collaborators, Samuel Malka and Freddy Leclerc. 3 moments in 3 districts of the Port, a teeming city that borders the ocean and extends to the Rivière des Galets, one of the gateways to the Cirque de Mafate. In the same idea as the mixtape, we wanted to take liberties with the sometimes somewhat formal framework of the clip. This story is a dystopia, it depicts two humans left to their own devices, whose links we don’t really know, and who could just as well be the last of their kind. It’s about life and survival, the boundary between these two realities becoming thinner every day. It speaks of the violence of our contemporary societies and of lost innocence. It speaks of a young island in the world and which observes its great movements with the eyes of a child who knows full well that he is being had, that no one is making fun of him. And then of the two protagonists of this story, who is really the child?
Why did you name it Position ?
POSITION is first and foremost where you are. It’s a lookout. It induces a singular perspective, lines of flight, which shape your reality and feed your imagination. It is also the place you choose to “live in”, the place you want to occupy, your agora, the sum of your choices and your struggles. Finally, for us, it is the particular situation of island micro-societies, which are each in their own way centers of the world, beating hearts, refuges at the same time as spaces where societies and the ever more mixed identities of tomorrow.
What can we expect on your album? What will be the major musical evolutions?
PANGAR is still and always a space of musical experimentation which mixes bass music and Creole rhythms, located somewhere between the old Europe of our childhood and the island of Reunion where we have lived for 15 years and from which, precisely, we observe and feel the march of the world. The album is certainly more committed, more radical than our previous releases, but it remains hybrid, between-two-worlds, and still plays with the codes of maloya or dancehall to create this phantom and polyrhythmic elsewhere, this place in the DNA a little cloudy, necessarily close to the equator, and necessarily crossed by the island feeling. Our location.
The mixtape is available here. The Position album will be released on May 5, and a release party will take place at Kabardock in Reunion the same evening, with Greg, Ohjeelo and other artists from the island.
