Marc'h Gouez

Description

"Why would I sing in French? I have Breton culture, I speak Breton, I live in Brittany, and Breton is the language of this country..." That is how Kristen Noguès explained it, whose first (rare) recorded album, Marc'h Gouez, is a fabulous journey through space with every listen. Noguès learned Breton from childhood, along with the Celtic harp, from Denise Mégevand, who would herself train other teachers, notably Alan Stivell. In the early 1970s, she discovered the tradition of Breton song (soniou and gwerziou) thanks to Yann Poëns and became involved with Névénoé, a cooperative of traditional expression founded by Gérard Delahaye and Patrick Ewen. It was under this label that her first album, Marc'h Gouez, was released in 1976. Surrounded by a dozen friends playing guitar, piano, violin, flute..., Noguès composed not Breton music, but music of Brittany: a kind of shared folklore where imagination blends with the reality of the moment, with social demands and camaraderie. From the very first notes of the record, you hear her pull up a chair, before the plucked notes of the harp turn into a cascade: "Enez Rouz" is an invitation to listen closely. One thinks here of Meredith Monk's "Greensleeves," there of the early albums by Brigitte Fontaine / Areski, elsewhere of Emmanuelle Parrenin, Pascal Comelade... Noguès's rhyming style is in perpetual evolution: airy ("Hunvre"), cosmopolitan ("Pinvidik Eo Va C'hemener"), enigmatic ("Ar Bugel Koar"), profound ("Ar Gemenerez"), or enchanting ("Hirness An Devezhiou"). And then there is the track that gives the album its name: Marc'h Gouez, which, between nursery rhyme and chamber music, weaves a fabulous web into which the listener is irresistibly drawn. "Brittany is poetry," said André Breton; and Kristen Noguès proves it.