Toto Bona Lokua

The project began with a simple wish to pool what each of them had: to meet for a single session, "just to see" what they could do together. What they had to say to each other, to exchange, to share; what they might reveal in one another that they never suspected they had. A laying bare, in a way. Being true, here and now, with no make-up, getting it right. Heart to heart. A cappella.

The instruments soon joined in, guitars, bass and percussion from every country, underlining the fragile frame of these highly melodic songs with light, elliptical arrangements. But the original spirit remained: no artifice, live, off the cuff, letting the soul speak through the human voice.

Three voices, then, on an equal footing; three singular paths, three parallel stories, three very distinct worlds, sharing one nourishing sun, near or far: Africa. Sensual, physical, colorful, alive and lived for Richard and Lokua. The first is Cameroonian, born on the Adamawa plateau between savanna and virgin forest; the second is Congolese. Both are bound by the might of the Congo River, which carries the myths and reality of a timeless land, and by the experience of exile, the discovery of an ultra-contemporary cosmopolitanism tinged with the nostalgia of every diaspora. Inherited, confiscated, for Gérald, a Parisian of West Indian descent, caught up in turn in the great drift of his deported ancestors and standing, despite himself, at the forefront of this new mixed world that is coming and already here, here as elsewhere.

No clash of cultures between these three, but a gentle, creeping contagion, as if borders had suddenly become porous. In this gradient of skin tones, in these nuances of vocal grain, between telluric power and Caribbean melancholy, beyond traditions, languages and ancestral cultures, the light utopia of an en-chanted world was born, then faded as soon as it reached your mind, leaving only the delicious trace of an ineffable sensuality.

So was it all just a dream? The magic of a moment? Perhaps. But are you quite sure?