La Cozna and Mary Hampton

About

Baba Yaga's Hut Presents: La Cozna & Mary Hampton at Cafe Oto La Cozna brings together musicians Clémentine Ristord (bass clarinet, drone box), Benjamin Garson (electric guitar), Pierre-Antoine Despatures (double bass) and Nicolas Jacobée (vocals). The quartet takes a series of traditional French songs from 20th-century collections and brings them into the present. Passed down in whispers in the secrecy of kitchens, these women's songs are stories of love, violence and freedom that play on domination with humour, drama and poetry. In Ni Nuit Ni Jour, the ambiguity of the lyrics flirts with a feverish sound, tense with desire and darkness. Mary Hampton makes new versions of traditional songs and offers them up as questions, and sometimes challenges, to the modern listener. Using voice, tenor guitar and a selection of other tools, she carries them through her own peculiarly raw-but-tender sound-world. The stories she tells explore the timeless liability of embodied experience.