RFI Musique: What's been going on for Lo’Jo over the last couple of years since you released your last album, Bazar Savant?
Denis Péan: The moment we bring out one album, we immediately start work on the next! It takes time for poetry and music to mature and for that to happen we need to spend time playing together. The way we generally work is to come up with twenty new songs and then whittle them down to a final twelve. The Lo'Jo philosophy is based on continuity, on moving on to a new cycle when the old one finishes. We've been off travelling again a lot over the last couple of years and I think our different experiences come through on Cosmophono. The songs on the new album recount what we've seen, what we've heard, what we've thought about and what we've understood… There are more noises and sound effects on Cosmophono. It's a much more acoustic album than Bazar Savant… Of all the albums we've made so far, this one was the quickest and the most live. We experimented a lot with sound texture, too, creating different musical universes for each song. The music for Café de la Marine, for instance, could never be used for Petit courage. The music works as a decor framing each song.

At the same time, Cosmophono seems to present a much more global vision of the world…
Maybe that's because in the songs we're trying to understand the way the world works - and at other times not understanding the way the world works at all! There are indirect references to global issues throughout the album. We touch on social, political and religious questions - and poetic ones, too! We're crawling inside and looking at the inner workings of the system. Personally I like to keep things a bit obscure and oblique, though. I don't want everything described explicitly. If I were an artist doing a portrait I'd probably do something like just paint an eye on the canvas…

What's the song Pays natal (homeland) about?
Pays natal is a cosmic opera on a small scale. It's about stealing land, about belonging and not belonging, about war, exile, colonialism and the new forms of colonialism at work in the world today. These are all subjects close to my heart…

Is the song intended to be some kind of reference to Aimé Césaire's Cahier d’un retour au pays natal?
Well, I wasn't thinking about Césaire in particular, but I did draw on the amazing language developed by Creole, Caribbean and Reunionese writers. Their writing is like a linguistic explosion with a powerful mystic dimension to it. I've always preferred the term "créolisé" to the term "métissé" which has so often been used about our music in the past.

How do you go about your own writing?
For me, picking up a notebook and jotting down my thoughts is a basic form of survival. I was touched by the fact that René Lacaille paid tribute to Lo’Jo on his latest album and what he said about me - "les mots c’est son manzé!" - is so true. I'm someone who literally feeds on words! I divide my time between writing songs, acting as the group's quasi manager and organising our commune near Angers which has become a sort of 'open house' for foreign musicians passing through. That's why I tend to use laconic expressions a lot of the time - it fits in with my busy schedule!

Am I mistaken or is there a hint of jazz on this new album?
Jazz features on all our records. I truly admire jazzmen. One day, Don Cherry came up and shook my hand - and that has to be just about one of the best moments of my life! I admire musicians who push their instrument all the way and jazzmen have a particularly extreme, at times almost desperate, relationship with their trumpet or their piano. I like a lot of other music, too, but nothing has the same extraordinary depth to it as jazz.

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 Listen to an extract from Je prends la nuit

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