Voice and skin, the strings of the soul and the drums of joy ! 

by Damien Toumi and Mànu Théron

Made up of Damien Toumi and Manu Théron – both singers and percussionists – Duò Lavoà Lapò are driven by a shared energy and passion for Occitan music and song.  To celebrate and revitalise their revival, they take up well-known and forgotten standards from all over the Òc region and introduce a playful, powerful and refreshing invention, combining vocal and rhythmic games, passionate polyphony and trance music.

DUÒ LAVOÀ LAPÒ is made up of Damien Toumi and Manu Théron, singer-percussionists whose backgrounds, passion and energy made them accomplices and com-plic partners even before they met !

It’s the revival of the Occitan language, popular vocals, the reworking of a truncated imagination – and the blossoming of the latter in a modernity that has nothing formal about it – that have brought them to this new musical project.. 

Starting out with an indefinable repertoire that takes the Occitanie region to every corner of their fanciful imagination, they build on the idea that two songs and two percussion instruments can say, arouse and reveal. Their carnal, precise unison explores traditional melodies, extracting their juices and restoring them in all their strangeness; the polyrhythm, patiently developed, plays with the frameworks and rhythms imposed on traditional bodies of work, disrupting and saturating unexpected motifs; The polyphony borrows from Mediterranean passions and infuses harmonies bursting with powerful warmth; finally, the complementarity of the two timbres is exalted by the heady bubbling of a chant-contrechant mastered to the point of prowess. 

It is in this concentrate of jovial inventions and never-failing spirituality that the two singers distil this precious material. Accompanied by Cyril Pelegrin, the project’s sound engineer and sound designer, they concoct a lyrical-festive craft that escapes the norms of mass consumption, and gives back to those who love it that ‘ESTIRADOR’ character that not only lasts, but also prolongs all pleasures.