Interview: La Souterraine — Paris Musique Club
Through their free downloads and FM radio show, la Souterraine scour the four corners of the French-speaking world on a mission to uncover the forgotten treasures of its underground pop scenes. Just before the release of their eighth compilation, the collective have moved into the basement art space in la Gaîté lyrique as part of the Paris Musique Club exhibition: to curate a series of concerts, projections, workshops and projects, from Thursday to Sunday. We caught up with la Souterraine to find our more about them, and the Paris Musique Club project.
Why did you launch La Souterraine?
Basically, in the French pop world at the time, there weren’t that many people ready and willing to take a chance on the bands that we liked. We thought that we had this little window of opportunity to spread our vision of the French underground pop scene across the world – and without any constraints, since all of the content on www.souterraine.biz is available for free.
Who is behind La Souterraine?
The basic idea was to bring together knowledgable people who were willing to devote their time to the cause. Laurent Bajon is a crate digger and an expert in new sounds. He presents our show, on Radio Campus Paris, La Souterraine. Benjamin Caschera co-manages Almost Musique, a label and publisher, and he’s also a media co-ordinator. There are other people involved, too: Rémy Poncet (Chevalrex / BrestBrestBrest) takes care of our visual identity and of the Souterraine parties, Sébastien Trihan of our VOL. multi-artist compilations, and Clément Haslé did the line-ups for the first 30 Souterraine parties at the Olympic.
How would you describe Paris and its music scene to a foreigner?
There are infinite artists and scenes, but there’s no real structure. They’re organised in a really atomised way, and there aren’t that many spaces for the underground to express itself in.
What’s your motto?
Either FRENCH POP UNDERGROUND, or “La Souterraine are a minority, that minority is everybody.”
