Six powerful, united, earthy, almost shamanic voices with a deep percussion accompaniment producing unforgettable hypnotic folk. Meet San Salvador, a young French group that sings in the Occitan dialect and gets people dancing at Festivals all over the world. In their captivating debut album La Grande Folie, to be released on January 22nd 2021, the sextet impresses with its mastery of harmonies, exuding emotion and modernity.

They have always known each other and have been singing together since childhood. So, at the same time as they learned to sing, harmonise and tone their voices according to the heritage of their region in the Massif Central, the young people who would later form San Salvador learned a certain freedom. They went through rock and punk, mixing brass instruments with their voices, before returning six years ago to an a cappella format reinforced by two bass toms and a tambourine.

Their polyphony is as rooted as it is creative, as “traditional” as it is resolutely contemporary. We don’t know if the effect they produce is in the same family as John Coltrane’s modal jazz, the hypnosis of hard tech or the total immersion of My Bloody Valentine but, irresistibly, we follow them into a trance. The listener feels carried away to an elsewhere in time that, curiously enough, is as familiar as it is exotic.