Magicien Rouch

Chants de possession, basés sur les mots et voix de Jean Rouch / Hommage aux Haukas Septembre 2016 / Taiwan Drawings by Lysianassa Dauby Available as a c40 cassette 80 copies Tanuki Records #22 French musician Yannick Dauby is known, and justly reknown, for his field-recordings around the world, and particularly of his country of adoption since 2007: Taiwan. Here he slightly changes his tactics in order to approach a very different material. For this new piece he chose as sound sources various interviews / archives from INA and french radio of anthropologist and film-maker Jean Rouch talking about his film Les Maitres Fous. The film, made in 1955, is one of the most fascinating and rarest document showing the Hauka's voodoo rituals. Mainly composed of migrant workers from the countryside of Niger and Ghana, this community, principally found around the city of Accra, devised possession rites to imitate, to emulate and to mock the british colonial authorities, and thus steal their life forces. Dauby cuts and splices Jean Rouch's voice as he describes and comments the estonishing practices composing the ritual, and the frantic episodes leading to the initiates'trance.