Deep Forest in Helsinki. For real!
Post from April 2024...
This week I was happy to be on a date with my beautiful wife - we went to a concert by Deep Forest! I’ve told about that several friends and nobody remembers Deep Forest. But they were huge in the 90th. Founded by Eric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez in France they produced a hit song Lullaby in 1992. They were pioneers in ethnic electronic music. Having samples of sounds from African tribal music, they formed absolutely great feelings about ethnic music in the field of synthesizers and all the modern sampling.
Being a kid, I once told a friend of my older sister that I was listening to Deep Forest - do you know them? I wanted to build some kind of coolness around myself. His reply was - I listened to them before you learned how to walk 🙂 But that doesn’t make music bad at all.
All those years it was quite hard to imagine them performing in actual concerts, to be honest. I looks a bit weird to me to see how a musician sets up prepared in advance samples sequence in a MacBook, and then plays along with it on 3-4 different synthesizers. But it is actually a good thing! Music is always adapting to something invisible, there is some vibration in the air, which connects Eric and his audience.
When we arrived at the dark hall, the concert had already started. This was the very first time in my life when a concert started on time and I was 15 minutes late. We crawled to our (or someone else’s seats) and stared at the old man with long white hair. He bowed down to one of his synthesizers on stage. He was so into the process of selecting samples, setting some volumes, and playing melody pieces. He seemed to be totally in the music he was doing, and I could imagine him doing the same alone somewhere at his remote home in the south of France. He was into it. Totally. Introvert Musincer - my wife called him. Like Introvert Thinker.
Music was everywhere, beats flew into my head and lungs, bass line from an African musician touched my heart with rhythmic air movements. It was like some good version of jazz with a lot of ethnic echos. The bassist even sang a couple of times. Eventually, the whole audience got up from their theatrical seats and started to dance. Actually, this show would have suited better to an ecstatic dance concert (like Pepe Danza) rather than to the theatre stage in the center of Helsinki.
In the beginning, I was sitting with closed eyes and my soul flew across the African savanna, I saw waves of tall grass swaying under the warm wind. I heard the voices of animals and I saw a spectacular sunset. In the end, I was dancing along with the music vibes, feeling the hot air, sandy wind, and smile of freedom.
Eric Mouquet, Deep Forest. Music of the world.
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