PULCINELLA - Tatekieto

A fantastic discovery, these Pulcinella. Having listened to their new "Tatekieto", and been left spellbound by its shapeshifting effervescence, it's pretty much inevitable to want to dig back through the rest of the band's output from Toulouse, now well over a decade long. There isn't a single album that sounds alike, and there isn't one that's any less electrifying.

But perhaps a step back is in order: Pulcinella? Unless proven otherwise, this album is released under the name Pulciperla. Which isn't quite the same thing. Not exactly, anyway: alongside the four French musicians, the lineup here is joined by La Perla, a trio of musicians from Bogotá. Long devoted above all to encounter and exchange, the carnivalesque jazz-rock of Pulcinella is thus enriched with a rainbow of new colours.

The fusion is explosive: there's the European component - chamber-music textures, swirls between musette and tziganerie, a none-too-hidden avant-prog streak - and then there's the whole centrifugal arsenal brought straight from Colombia as dowry: hip-hop and tumbao, cumbia and gaïta bagpipes, unison vocal assaults and percussion with evocative names (tambor alegre and guacharaca - a kind of local fowl).

The record opens with a zig-zag chase: the title track immediately shows how tight the communication is between the two bands, weaving oblique horns and Caribbean patterns together with a restlessness that recalls the São Paulo of the Vanguarda Paulista more than it does the folkloric Bogotá the polyrhythms underpinning everything actually come from. The common thread is a mixed-blood energy, always on the verge of collapse yet orchestrated with surprising clarity. In “Tabogo” this chaos becomes choreographic storytelling: amid keyboards whirring like hand organs and brass in hot pursuit, a musical chase takes shape that mirrors – in both form and empty space – the unpredictability of the elusive mosquito the title refers to. It's a game, but one with shifting rules and a relentless pace.

“Croissant” pushes the interlocking to the point of paroxysm, cramming oblique ska, naïf electronics, sharp-edged rap and flute flourishes into the same space: the result is a centrifuge that spins without ever losing altitude, with changes of direction and pace that are as disorienting as they are entertaining. And “El Gran Godzilla”, if anything, goes even further: it takes a merengue, takes it apart, pushes it in a thousand directions, then puts it back together – and just when you least expect it, it opens onto a hammering reggaeton, kept on track by Marc Serpin's double bass and Pierre Pollet's drums.

Diana Sanmiguel, Giovanna Mogollón and Karen Forero are not guests: their presence redefines the project's center of gravity, adding another axis of rotation to a collective that already thrived on diagonal momentum. Anyone wanting to explore other branches of the same spirit can start with the previous album, “Grifone“, credited to Pulcinella together with singer Maria Mazzotta, already a member of the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino. Same whirling attitude, different trajectory, identical hunger for fertile collisions.

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21/05/2025