Telegrams

The coast is rough, strewn with driftwood and black basalt pebbles. Gigantic waves heaving and crashing on it, fierce and confident like the rougail dakatine from Ti Carri. Up dans les hauts de Saint-Pierre, le Kerveguen is a strange building, unfinished, industrial, looking like a soviet factory. Inside the venue it feels like the engine room of a cargo, the sound is booming, echoing against...

Early morning, a creole house nestled within the town of St-Gilles. Hidden inside, a small television studio. Walls covered with vinyl records. Heat. For a program called Galigalang we perform « Isabella », then « Black Betty/Sonlouval » with our friends Christine Salem and her percussionnists Harry & David on rouleur drum & piker. All nine musicians are compressed together on a tiny...

Jet-lag. Body clock still tuned into Montreal time. Eyes wide open in the sweltering heat of an unknown room. 5:30am. Alien birdsongs outside, loud and intricate. Lift up the blinds. Palm trees, corrugated metal roofs, haze rising from the forests on the slopes of a rugged mountainside. Dawn is coming, the sky is quickly changing hues. Turn on the A/C and try to get back to sleep, hopelessly...

Oté Koman y lé? Re-uniting with the island and its music. Christine Salem and her musicians Harry and David welcome us to St-Denis; just an hour after landing we’re already set to rehearse with them on stage inside the Palaxa, a venue tucked into an old factory facing the Ocean. Our drummer Eric locks into the maloya rythm, the roulèr bass drum resounds, the kayamb percussion roars, the...

Sunday morning in Montréal, say farewell to the snow-caked sidewalks, leaping over ponds of muddy slush from Mont-Royal to Avenue Laurier. Sunshine melts the icicles away from the high-pitched roofs, but we won’t have time to watch them stab the ground. Hop on a cab to Trudeau Airport and 48 hours later we’re flying over eastern Africa, bound for the Southern hemisphere. From the aft...

Titanic iron-truss bridges across the Saint-Laurent river, trailing a broken ice mantle. Arthur drives the van -packed with amplifiers, a double-bass, a drumkit, five guitars, twenty harmonicas and all the Moriarty family- across slippery highways, down to Sherbrooke. Suburban feel, brickhouses, wide roads, telephone poles, all silent under the falling snow. Tonight we play in a brewery across...

It was a cold sunny day. The slush melted in the curbs. The Cabaret Lion d’Or looked as dark and magnificent as four years ago on our first concert in Montreal. The crowd came at the last minute, filling up the former clandestine bar to the brim. At the balcony a mixed crowd of français and québecois looked on and cheered like crazy. Meanwhile, at the Quai des Brumes at the corner of Mont...

Moriarty on tour: Montréal, Québec, february 21st 2013. Long walks across Mile End, under the snow, frozen noses, wind slaps our faces like a giant whip, wet feet from the sloche, looking for the Maisonnette recording studio, where Lhasa recorded her last album. Learning winter survival in Montréal.

Moriarty on tour: all guitars stacked in the trunk of the tour van, driving through the falling snow, lonesome houses marooned in the white desert, until we finally reach the slushy streets of Mile End and the Plateau; the long straight road from Québec to Montréal, february 21st 2013.