Theatre De La Mer

After a few years of holding the annual Convenanza festival inside the castle at Carcasonne this year's Convenanza moved to the coast and and the port town of Sete. Convenanza is a three day festival organised by Bernie Fabre with a line up of artists chosen by Andrew Weatherall and Bernie- this year's festival at Sete took place in the outdoor theatre shown above, the Theatre de la Mer where the backdrop is the Mediterranean Sea. I can't get to the south of France for a weekend during term time but I have online sources who were there and provided a running commentary of pictures, clips, tunes and reports over the weekend. The line up for this year looked like this...

As the weekend wound down one of my social media friends was raving about the impact this song had when played in the theatre outdoors after dark. It's a lovely Balearic chugger from 2012 by Coyote with a vocal by Gavin Gordon, the sort of song that takes you up and brings you down...

Minamoto

There's a very good acid tinged remix by Sean Johnston as well, the half of A Love From Outer Space that isn't Mr Weatherall. The same roving reporter on the dockside also pointed us towards this one by Norway's Laars, a mid-paced dj set track that goes a bit loopy in the middle and seems to have set hairs on the back of the neck on end and arms in the air...

The ALFOS dj set, Weatherall and Johnston back to back, on Friday night closed with This Mortal Coil's spine-tingling cover of Song To The Siren, Liz Fraser's voice drifting out from the theatre to the sea, 'Long afloat on shipless oceans, I did all my best to smile'....

Song To The Siren