Dyaoulé Pemba are hotter than hot right now with their debut album, Moonlight chante Haïti, receiving a significant amount of attention. Not only that, but the group have been selected to appear in the ‘Discovery’ section at the Printemps de Bourges festival this weekend. RFI Musique hooks up with the group’s charismatic lead singer, Moonlight Benjamin, and talks Haitian culture and voodoo vibes.

When Moonlight Benjamin left the Caribbean just before her thirtieth birthday and enrolled on a singing course in Toulouse in 2002, she soon discovered that her homeland meant little to the French people she met. Whenever people asked Moonlight where she came from and she replied "Haiti" people always seemed to get her birthplace mixed up with "Tahiti." Moonlight was astounded by this muddled geography - and all the more so because she feels that "There is an authentic historical relationship between Haiti and France. France is still felt as a strong presence over there. So how come Haiti has been completely forgotten here?" This was a question that nagged away at the back of Moonlight’s mind for a while before she finally decided that this gave her the ideal opportunity of introducing listeners to her native culture via her music.

Accompanied by Johann Azuelos - a French percussionist she had met back in Haiti and whom she had kept in contact with over the years - Moonlight performed her first concert in France just a few months after arriving in Toulouse. Appearing at a festival celebrating African culture, she was booked to sing in a local chapel. Moonlight was to be the final act in the evening’s line-up, but she was dismayed to see the audience filing out at the end of the set just before her. This looked to be a very bad omen, but Moonlight came up with a dramatic idea. "I asked for all the lights in the chapel to be switched off before I performed," she says, "And when I went out on stage I lit a candle and started singing completely unaccompanied. There was just me and my voice. Then the percussion came in really softly and the technicians gradually brought the lights back up. It was at that moment that I realised the audience had come back."

Following this concert, Moonlight went on to recruit a group of musicians from the

Toulouse region with the intent of pursuing her original aim of promoting Haitian culture abroad. The fact that these musicians had a totally different musical culture from her own and came from very different backgrounds did not bother her in the least. On the contrary, Moonlight was committed to the idea of creating as interesting a fusion as possible. "The musicians in the group have all got their own personalities," she says, "and they’re all free to make any suggestions they like. We have a very collaborative way of working, based on a genuine spirit of exchange - and that’s the way I like it! I know that without the others, I wouldn’t be doing what I am now."

The all-acoustic formation proved to work so well together that Moonlight decided not to hog the spotlight as lead singer with her backing group in the shadows. "There’s more coherence between us all this way," she says, explaining why she chose to call the group Dyaoulé Pemba - an old Creole term meaning "big party." After honing their skills on the live circuit for several years, the aptly-named Dyaoulé Pemba took their festive sound into a studio in the Haute Garonne region and recorded their debut album, Moonlight chante Haïti.

Of the ten tracks on Dyaoulé Pemba’s debut album, only three - Nago, Ayitik and Legba - were actually written by the group themselves. "I wanted to use people who really know about songwriting," insists Moonlight, "I actually write very little myself. The thing is, I believe everyone’s got their own vocation, their own talent in life. The thing is, I love the French language so I don’t want to write it any old how. I’m capable of writing in Creole, but not in French. It just seems a bit beyond me right now."

Instead, Moonlight preferred to dig deep into Haiti’s traditional music heritage and pay tribute to her illustrious compatriot Toto Bissainthe. She has also drawn on lyrics penned by Manno Charlemagne (an ardent defender of Haitian culture who enjoyed a stint as city mayor in Port-au-Prince). Charlemagne wrote two songs featured on her new album, Fini les colonies and Le Capitaine America, and the author Jean-Claude Martineau contributed a number of songs, too. Martineau supported Moonlight in the early stages of her career back in Haiti when she put in time collaborating with other artists and released some songs on the local music scene, but never had the opportunity of taking things much further than that.

Moonlight remains deeply attached to her native culture but the unique musical identity she has forged for herself over the years has also been strongly influenced by French ‘chanson.’ ‘Chanson’ is still extremely popular in Haiti today and Moonlight admits to being a fervent admirer of ‘chanteurs à textes’ like Léo Ferré and ‘chanteuses à voix’ such as the late great Piaf. "Basically, the difference between what I used to do in Haiti and what I’m doing now," she says, "can be felt on a musical level - because I obviously used to work with Haitian musicians – but on a cultural level, too. I’ve started talking about voodoo now, whereas before I never sang any kind of traditional music at all. I was worried people would start wagging their fingers at me!"

Moonlight was adopted at birth and brought up in a strict Protestant household where she felt unable to express herself. She ended up leaving home at the age of sixteen with the firm intention of "going off and seeing what was going on elsewhere." And this meant exploring the inner workings of voodoo which she had always been told was "the devil’s music." Moonlight may have taken her time in assuming her new-found identity, but on the album Moonlight chante Haïti she comes into her own with her performances of traditional voodoo songs such as Twavay. "Twavay hails this spirit known as Kouzen Zaka," she says, "Kouzen Zaka is the god of the land, the god of work. You can’t actually perform a voodoo ceremony for one particular spirit without hailing all the other gods, too, and you have to call them in a certain order. The ceremony is played out through ritual songs and dance." Ritual songs and dance which, it seems, Moonlight and Dyaoulé Pemba are committed to preserving in their own unique way.