A multidisciplinary artist and curator who has spent the last few years producing exhibitions, developing documentaries and directing music videos and short films, Violaine Morgan Le Fur dips more than a toe into the sometimes murky waters of music production with her debut album as Violence Gratuite, adorning an aluminium tail as her siren vocals sound out from a rickshaw of barebones gqom and trap, slippery kuduros and misty French chanson.
Playing around with music software a mere matter of weeks before she decided to dub her record, it is no surprise that Baleine à Boss bristles with ideas yet with a deft hand Violence Gratuite manages to sculpt all of her source material into a shapely and buoyant whole. Le Fur grew up in the sprawling suburbs of Paris and channels much of her personal history on the record, compelled by her Breton mother and Cameroonian father, her mother’s film archives and her own footage which she captured on the high plateaus of Bamiléké land for the sake of the autobiographical documentary À L’ouest back in 2017.
There are echoes too of some of her formative listening experiences, like the crude funk and self-styled Maasai shuffle of the no wave singer Lizzy Mercier Descloux, whose first album Press Color followed dalliances with Patti Smith and Richard Hell in New York City and second album Mambo Nassau was bankrolled by the Island Records chief Chris Blackwell at Compass Point Studios, before Zulu Rock blended African folk rhythms with contemporary French pop stylings as Descloux foreshadowed Graceland and became one of the pioneers of worldbeat, or like the spectral trip hop of Tricky’s debut album Maxinquaye.
For all of its multiplicity, at heart the music on Baleine à Boss is rooted in a combination of hand drums and balafon mallet percussion plus sawing, droning or wobbling synths, often trance-inducing and sometimes accompanied by other found or faux-naive elements like starter keyboards, scats and whistles and field recordings of street noise or what sounds like screeching cats. Its winding and repetitious melodies are cut through by ramshackle drum breaks and given a sense of polish and whimsy by Le Fur’s cooing vocals, smooth and sultry and ready to draw the listener in while remaining embedded within the centre of the mix.
While the album opener ‘Iséo’ makes a splash over grimey synths and bottle cap percussion, ‘Olive’ foregrounds handpan or steel tongue drums plus shakers over insidious alien loops, with Gratuite who sings mostly in French embellishing the sense of skittering and propulsive motion with a swooning and scatting refrain of ‘come on baby’ in English. ‘L’hiver avec toi’ plays a nauseous fairground melody next to murmuring choral vocals, and beyond its evocation of Sade, the track ‘Smooth Operation’ clearly reclaims the refrain from the ‘Soul Makossa’ of the Cameroonian songwriter, saxophonist and vibraphonist Manu Dibango.
Sometimes misheard as referring to the ‘side of a mountaintop’, the stuttering Duala scats of ‘Soul Makossa’ were interpolated without Dibango’s permission by Michael Jackson on his post-disco classic ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin”, with the matter settled out of court in the mid-eighties only for the controversy to rear its head once again, years later upon the release of Rihanna’s Jackson-sampling 2007 hit ‘Don’t Stop the Music’. Violence Gratuite then skirts the conversation, reasserting the musicality of the refrain while waving a flag for her Cameroonian heritage.
Flapping like a fish out of water before swaying with a skeletal swagger, that sinuous blend of choral vocals and hand drums reemerges on the title track to Baleine à Boss as the conch-blowing mermaid unites with the Ugandan percussionist Maganda Shakul. And as the sound of wailing felines and wop-wop helicopters plus nascent strings and reeds fades from view, the album shifts gears from the Neptunes-like clopping percussion of the R&B-styled ‘Une Ouf’ to the reggae-sprach of ‘Ragga Nieztches’, and from the queasy aerophones of ‘Cristal’ to the ricocheting nocturnal dembow of the record closer ‘Bad à Bras le Corps’, with the Nyege Nyege offshoot Hakuna Kulala ultimately describing Baleine à Boss as like a ‘variety show’ which is ‘as comfortable in the club as it is at a fest noz’.
