Black Sea Dahu – live in Lausanne, Switzerland – Recorded by RTS Couleur 3 -March 14, 2019 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Black Sea Dahu in concert to end the weekend and hold your breath for the upcoming week. Recorded live in the studios of RTS Couleur 3 in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 14, 2019.
Black Sea Dahu are singer-songwriter Janine Cathrein and a gang of musical cohorts. Think: modern-day Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. But instead of dropping copious amounts of LSD and driving around in a VW mini-bus, they trip out on sound and studio-related cabin fever.
“Black Sea” is an excerpt from the lyrics to my song White Creatures (White creatures looking after me, oh-ooh, I lost faith in the human I wanted to be, oh open black sea let me in, giant trees give me shelter in that haunted place.) The “Dahu” is a mythological creature that appears in folk tales in France, Switzerland and Northern Italy. It’s a mountain goat-like animal whose legs have differing lengths so that it can walk upright along the mountain slope.
White Creatures – the debut full-length from Swiss outfit Black Sea Dahu – is the type of record that will rearrange your internal architecture and, ultimately, make you see the world and yourself anew. If you let it. When you press play, you are basically committing to a vision quest, an x-ray like rendering of the human condition as experienced by vocalist and songwriter, Janine Cathrein. The entire journey – because that’s what it feels like – is set to a gritty, dusty, yet orchestrally rich and cinematic take on the urban folk aesthetic. The arrangements sound huge throughout, as they support and amplify the carefully calibrated and emotionally saturated songwriting (and performances) – the type that you would normally expect from artists with a long discography. This, on the other hand, is just “day one” of the project. White Creatures was written over a period of four years and was recorded at a remote studio located in Giske, Norway, in a series of 17 cabin-fever inducing days.
Here is a concert they did last March in the studios of RTS, the Swiss radio and TV network in Lausanne. The only caveat is the almost constant running dialogue from the Swiss dj’s, slapping over the intros to most of the songs. It’s frustrating, but it’s a rare opportunity to sample a band you might not be familiar with, but really need to be.
So, be aware of the outbreak of chatty and know it calms down after the first half-minute or so between songs.
