Nibul
When asked about musical influences Nibul percussionist Bertrand Fraysse names the exploratory and lengthy improvisations of jazz colossus John Coltrane and the American Primitivism of guitarist and composer John Fahey. He also casually mentions a youtube list he keeps updated regularly that goes deep into all types of ethnic music. Scrolling down this impressive list of footage from all over the world one can find examples of Sacred Shinto music, Bulgarian polyphony, traditional Ghanese drumming to Tibetan nuns singing and much, much more. What connects these forms of music for Fraysse is that they all favor drones and have some form of explicit communal aspect. And, most importantly, it’s the sort of stuff that simply moves him personally.
There is definitely a ritualistic and communal aspect that drives Nibul’s music that seems to be found also in these examples. Fraysse and saxophone player Julie Gineste state that interaction (with each other and the audience) and energy are key to their jams. That would explain why Nibul always insists on playing on the floor with the audience gathered around them. This live experience - instigating and being part of the ritual or communion- is what matters most to them, confessing not being overtly interested in reproducing their sound on record. Or as they put it; ‘music is not the center of what is happening at a concert’.
Nibul clearly aims to bring an audience together into trance and the Toulouse based duo do this through improvised sets of long and brutal drones, created by loops and saxophone and augmented with vocalizations from both members. The Tibetan style percussion propels these into a high energy maelstrom that is hard to swim out of. Fraysse and Gineste talk about how when they started Nibul the music was supposed to be ‘free’, but say a sort of unplanned structure somehow emerged, a mold that they use to get where they need to go. There is a functionality to their music that seems to be at the heart of what creating trance music is about and in their responses they touch upon the impossibility of understanding the music outside of the ritual of live performance.
In ‘Why Do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution (2011)’, evolutionary musicologist Joseph Jordania puts down a thesis that early human survival was aided by creating a collective state through music known as the “battle trance.” All night long sessions of ceremonial drumming and dancing made participants enter a state of mass hypnosis, an altered state where pain and fear were thrown out of the window and where they acted as a single unit, ready to sacrifice their lives for the community.
Self-awareness dissipated into unified thought and collective action through repetitive beats and movements. The spontaneity in which we still react to repetitive drumming and music might be traced back to this sort of natural selection. In short, the people that drum together, stay together!
In today’s day and age it’s not like we still need to hype each other up to go out and kill a wooly mammoth en groupe, but there clearly is still a strong connection between trance inducing music and the bonding of a community. And there is still a need to come together and experience something that connects us to to each other as it did our former ancestors. Nibul most probably won’t play all night long on Eastern Daze III, but they will surely conjure some sounds that will spark our ancient, reptilian brains.
In today’s day and age it’s not like we still need to hype each other up to go out and kill a wooly mammoth en groupe, but there clearly is still a strong connection between trance inducing music and the bonding of a community. And there is still a need to come together and experience something that connects us to to each other as it did our former ancestors. Nibul most probably won’t play all night long on Eastern Daze III, but they will surely conjure some sounds that will spark our ancient, reptilian brains.