Damily

Tsapiky

«Trances and ululations, loud, repetitive notes, patched-up amps and dilapidated guitars, shrill voices and swaying femalee dancers enough to make your head spin, endless repeats, fantastic riffs that will only stop if the generator (vital to the group) conks out: yes, tsapiky is dangerous music. Tsapiky captivates, enchants, makes you fall and helps you up.

It’s unruly, but like all things that are unruly, it’s like a cry of joy, crude – pure savagery, some will think.

In the semi-desert bush of Madagascar, tsapiky makes you feel you want to go on living; it’s blood, the pulse of a barren land, it’s the bond that unites bodies and souls, that shows the way to happiness, that thumbs its nose at the solitude of such vast spaces.

It probably originated in Africa; it dates from the dawn of time. Now it has been electrified, so it can cry even louder. It’s music untamed, as the South – this land of free men, where this unique, joyful, impulsive sound is heard, challenging the immense destitution – is untamable.

It’s a cry of love full of tenderness and violence, a repetitive act. Like the notes of a guitar that has lost the fingers of its master and goes on playing the same chords over and over again in order to remembe and say and scream that here there is nothing, and that it was worth spending a moment of one’s life in this Nowhere on Nothing.»

Jean Claude Mouyon, « Roman Vrac, Trilogie » Bibliothèque malgache, 2007, p.63