'Yallah Mickey Mouse' second album

  L’autoroute blanche, la piscine le dimanche, le Mont Saint Michel… all join the scene, Cyril Cyril stirs the snow globe, Helvet underground as they are called. Cyril Cyril's Sunday is a trance, we arrive, people gather. The samples vocals, hesitates, moans a little, Miami Beach, OK let's go.

 

This is how Cyril Cyril introduce their new album “Yallah Mickey Mouse“. Once again, they take back their instruments and their roots with their ruffled tips. It is not about untangling. The sonorities are sculpted in vibrating marbles with indocile fossils. A visionary sonic narration, an invitation to an unorganized journey. Multiple influences are called on in the frame of this project of personal emanations and studio research. A tribute to the friends of Hyperculte in memory of an Egyptian camel, winks to the phrasing of Cha Cha Guitry, to the animal of Gerard Manset or to the hand of Indochine.

 

We are here, they are on stage. In the beginning, we are only human. The voice speaks, images stand in front of our eyes, now we have to make room for them. So we move a little bit, we swing to let the mirages of the oil lamp flow. Cyril Bondi is at the drums with his custom instruments, his body is trained to the groove of the wizards, and the fanfare of delirious insects starts. Cyril Yeterian is on the banjo or on the electric guitar. His storyteller's voice, that has travelled time and migrations, resumes the stories suspended since our last meeting. This song. A ground swell, the ground vanished under our feet, we find ourselves upside down, we feel like dancing on our hands. These rhythms. Hands on the sand, we tap, slide and resonate. Cyril Cyril carries our voices, including the ones of those who are no longer here. They come back, it's crazy how modern they are, and then without embarrassment too, without embarrassment and generous, happy to be able to regain a little youth, it looks lost, they sing. Cyril Cyril carries their voices. It's beautiful to see how lost we are, how we are searching, it's the music that keeps us standing, inspired, engaged, tangled, it comes out of all the bodies that listen to it, it radiates an transcendent power. 

 

Our reeds, our hands, undulate, breathe, like this music. Cyril Cyril carries our bodies. The ternary scale of our emotions and our smiles that come back. The wave makes us lose ourselves, but the harmonies gently overtake this feeling as we lay on the sand.

Also, the irony. The figures of power, the small march of insects accompanies them while laughing, these presidents. And always the surprise, bells ring in all our ears, those of our skin, our eyes and our hands, which have become our feet, we no longer know. We transform ourselves. And this joy that always comes back. Cyril Cyril carries our senses. These sounds, these rhythms, remind us of something. The memories are richer than those we could have gathered in a lifetime. Cyril Cyril opens our minds. We resonate more and more, we get more and more entangled, everything intertwines, the sounds and their lights. We are the Kaméaméa generation, and the frontiers we no longer want are shattered. The music must not stop. Yallah! The psychedelic organ melody accompanies the voice which rises in the higher frequencies, the percussions encourage us. We accelerate the pulsation, we get closer and stomp together, we want the head of Mickey Mouse. Echoes of bird songs, of a bestiary. We are animals, the carnival of animals, if they still want us. We are not going to leave each other like that, one last dance, we rush, now we know how to reverse the poles, the borders are abolished, everything circulates, the sounds, the joy of being together, Cyril Cyril carries us away.

 

Marion Zurbach

 

 

Bio

 

Of all the Cyrils born in the city of Calvin at the dawn of the 80s, these two were bound to find each other. Two Cyrils like two dizygotic souls whose contingencies have brought their meeting forward. Cyril Cyril. A liberated hydra, born in this city of diplomats where Borges duplicated his rejuvenated ego in “The Other”.

On the ruins of their worn out bands, they put together an innately cosmopolitan empire. Because these Cyrils have devoured miles, away from their Genovese haven.

A muezzin without borders, Cyril Yeterian came to the disheveled world through Mama Rosin, a three-piece that stirred the ghosts of the rogue bayou, the clammy Mardi Gras of some electric Louisiana. Soon, the world fell in love with their flair. The BBC celebrated them, Jon Spencer produced them, records proliferated. And then in 2017, the honeymoon period passed. Cyril was alone.

Well, not quite: music kept popping up around him. Inside his Bongo Joe record store, on the label of the same name, in the underground DJ sets he stirred up, Yeterian explored like crazy, in a binge of exiled grooves.

Within the same space-time, Cyril Bondi hit the road. Diatribes, La Tène, Insub Meta Orchestra, the most adventurous projects of the Geneva scene all had a bone to pick with this percussionist in search of unheard beats. He, as well, traveled, experienced the ascent, the euphoria of the peaks and then the fall. Plaistow, his mediumistic, hypnotic jazz band, heckled the saturated world of piano-bass-drums trios and won hearts through Europe and the East. Until the breaking point.

So Bondi started looking for premises to drop his equipment. He found better: an accomplice for musical prospecting, another Cyril in tune with his rebellious instinct.

Enough with leaning upon solid piers like a Colossus of Rhodes. This adventure required new baggage, a new language. Cyril and Cyril were in the same boat, and both took the plunge.

A guitarist and an accordionist, Cyril Y. took on the banjo, adding effect pedals to it to turn it into a puny bouzouki, an epic bağlama or a krar. Cyril B. cobbled some cannibal drum kit together, with massive jingle bells and tropical nut shells embedded in his marching bass drum.

You should have seen these two, on a populous festival night, bringing a narrow club to fever pitch by summoning utopian Neguses. Playing new Berbers, provoking unlikely seismic soukous in a trance that has as much to do with the hippie giddiness as with Fraggle Rock.

Indeed, for Cyril Cyril, music is a way of the world, a joyful decentration offering new keys to comprehend chaos. The point here has nothing to do with some globalized country excursion nor some gluten-free exoticism. Beneath the beach lie the paving stones. Politics always end up showing on the surface of these exhilarating chants, of these skeletal grooves.

Apart from tracing back the family pathway of some belatedly-adopted Lebanese dialect, Cyril Yeterian chants rhapsodies in French, the merciless terms of which say it all about coming insurrections.

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