Muddy Gurdy will be revealing “Seven“, their third album, when it is released on 6 September 2024
by Buda Musique. This opus will be presented on Thursday 12 September 2024 on the stage of the
Studio de L’Ermitage during a special launch concert.
➡ The single “Louisiana Blues” will be available from 28 June 2024 on all platforms.⬅
Muddy Gurdy is a unique, visionary trio on an adventure between two lands, Mississippi and Auvergne.
This unusual group (a singer-guitarist, a hurdy-gurdy player and a percussionist) has invented its own
music, rootsy and psychedelic, generous and earthy.
Line-up :
Tia Gouttebel: vocals, guitars, backing vocals
Gilles Chabenat: hurdy-gurdy
Fabrice Bony: percussion, backing vocals
‘’Auvergne-Mississippi with Muddy Gurdy in 2017, Mississippi-Auvergne with Homecoming in 2020. And now Auvergne-Louisiane with Seven. These three albums form a space-time triptych, the realisation of the Muddy Gurdy trio’s idea, as mad as it was visionary: to create a music of the earth and of the earth, to dig a deep furrow from the volcanoes of Auvergne to the hills of Mississippi or the bayous of Louisiana, to affirm by example that the gestures of musicians can be as universal and
ancestral as those of farmers here or elsewhere. Their tools? A hurdy-gurdy, guitars, percussion and singing.
The story could have ended with Homecoming, after the death of Marco Glomeau, the group’s percussionist and companion to singer-guitarist Tia Gouttebel, and the brilliant mind and prankster behind the Muddy Gurdy project. Marco had wanted the adventure to continue as planned, with this chapter on the Louisiana soil that the group had already explored several times. The new trio (with Gilles Chabenat on hurdy-gurdy and friend Fabrice Bony on percussion) recorded Seven as they know how: quickly and well. In one week, in a whirlwind of encounters, with songs and people, sometimes arranged long ago and sometimes from one day to the next, in places where people live (a classroom with 50 children in the chorus, a boat, a lawn, the stage of a club while the customers are having drinks…), with a small technical team and a mobile studio for the recording.
In this cool, frenetic and spiritual album, we hear Cajun music, zydeco accordion, a Mardi Gras Indian chief’s song, and revisited classics by Nina Simone, Muddy Waters and Hank Williams. We discover the ‘juror’ of the Broussard Sisters (and it’s a revelation). We savour the richness of the Louisiana ingredients, and the trio’s talent for transforming them into Muddy Gurdy songs. No dogma, no ethnomusicological pretensions, just the pleasure of meeting and sharing. Seven is not a history lesson, but a lesson in life and perhaps even survival. Why is this third album called Seven? Because they left for Louisiana as a six-piece, but Marco Glomeau’s spirit was with them on the trip, always present in the group’s adventure and in their hearts.’’
Stéphane Deschamps
