Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul are back with their debut album ‘Topical Dancer’ and with it, comes their trademark infectious melodies and natural humour. With Belgium as their mutual home, but Guadeloupean, French-Martinique and Chinese heritage running through their veins, this album presents an electric perspective on the immigrant experience.

Produced with Stephan and David Dewaele of Soulwax, and in the works since their last joint EP, 2019’s ‘Zandoli’, this album boasts a joyously glitchly electro sound amidst its profound and confronting messages. For example, on lead single ‘Blenda’, Adigéry sings ‘Go back to your country where you belong / Siri, can you tell me where I come from?’ as a reference to the racism they’ve both experienced. Meanwhile the latest single ‘Making Sense Stop’ touches on the contradictions faced with overcoming fear and regaining control. And ‘Reappropriate’ tackles the need for sexual liberation in the midst of trauma. Yet all the way through, these are songs that will still have you raise a smile, throw your hands up and flail your feet all at once.

Here, the Ghent-based duo sits down with Nataal to tell us about their fresh, fun and fervent embodiment of “yin and yang” in the rapid era of pop culture, and how it feels to navigate music in a socio-political climate unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Aswan Magumbe: How would you describe the special sound you create together?

Charlotte Adigery: It's so hard to define because we love all kinds of music.

Bolis Pupul: There are so many genres in it so it's everything - it's nuts. In the end, I think you can just dance to it, and you don't have to worry about ‘is this now?’, ‘is this techno?’, ‘is this house?’, ‘is it popular?’ It's just music and we don't have to label it as such.

AM: What were your intentions when making the album?

CA: If I could conclude the theme of the album, and the way we work and everything, it's about finding this balance - sonically, lyrically, visually - but it's not something we do consciously. We add humour to it, but we don't want to use irony as an easy tool to talk about these heavy topics, and also not carry the responsibility.

BP: That's where the name ‘Topical Dancer’ comes from, it’s like yin and yang. It's being cerebral and being more emotional. It's static and dynamic, and it's finding that balance. That's what our friendship is, and how we see things, how we try to nuance sometimes hard topics that we think are important, and we listen to each other. We hate the polarisation that's happening right now, and it's very saddening to see how much we're getting divided from each other.

AM: Why was this the right time to make it?

CA: We created this language between us, and we have made two EPs, and we’ve gotten to know the way we worked, even though it was still very instinctive. So, we knew we had so much more to talk about.

BP: It's also the evolution. The first EP (2017’s ‘La Falaise’) was naive. We didn't really know what we wanted to do, we wanted to maybe share some experiences and just touch a few things. In the second EP, Zandoli, we thought we could go a bit further, and came back from observations, and asked questions. The album was the real work – the talks we were having in the studio were synced in through the lyrics and the music.

AM: Your songs often sound conversational. Is this how they come about?

BP: Every time we walk into the studio, we have something else to tell each other, and it's crazy how much we can talk to each other. I think there’s this sensitivity to then knowing when we can use something in our music.

CA: Stephan and David really helped us on that part so it was definitely fun. We had a conversation, and we decided to make a sound out of it, and then they were like, ‘Okay, but what are you really trying to say? And why are you making this song?’ These questions invite us and help us to dig deeper and make sure that every song we made and every story we had to tell didn’t have to be super contemplative. So, it's a group effort.

AM: Your songs tackle some hard-hitting topics - racism, post-colonialism, cultural appropriation, misogyny – in a hyper direct yet seemingly comfortable way. How do you achieve that?

BP: I ask myself this question sometimes as well. I think there's a certain climate in which you are almost afraid to say anything, because whenever you open your mouth and have an opinion, then there's somebody else shouting ‘no’ or getting offended by it. The thing that helped us a lot during the writing of harder, more political songs is the humour we use in our music. That's something that helps us to bring the message without pointing fingers or being demoralising. We just have fun in the studio, we talk about stuff, but we don’t claim to have the truth.

CA: I also think it helps to stay confident about what you say, and I've never really felt afraid - or not yet.

AM: Does making this music help tackle these issues in your real lives?

BP: Locally, I'm not a minority… it's a joke. But we experience some racism. Recently, my sister got ‘Corona’ yelled at on the street by some guy. Then I had a guy come up shouting ‘Squid Game’ to me.

CA: Humour is such a great way for us to not become bitter. Anger is a great fuel to get things done, to change things, and to address things. Even though I have a huge temperament, lingering in that anger is not productive, and it would destroy me more than it would do good. I realised a mild tone is better and that people listen more closely. In the end, that’s what I want. Being able to laugh at yourself is something we feel is important to muster sometimes.

AM: So that humour has been there from the start?

CA: Yes. Even on the first EP is the song ‘Senegal Seduction’, which is about this guy who tries to hit on me in the parking lot, and we made a sound out of it. I had so much fun writing the lyrics, which were to me, very funny and very freeing. It would be weird if there wasn’t humour in our music because it's part of who we are.

BP: They say there are limits to humour but I also think it's important to know there are limits to seriousness. Humour is something that works as oxygen to seriousness. If you’re too serious, and you add some humorous oxygen, more water starts flowing again.

AM: How do you navigate being unintentional educators through your music?

CA: We've experienced things, and we want to share them, and we hope that people could maybe listen to it and find a way to reflect on things they said in the past.

BP: I think in a way, everybody has been a bit racist. There's this enormous stress on the word racism, so whenever you use the word, everybody's like, ‘no but I'm not a racist’. But I must confess, I've had racist thoughts as well.

CA: Music is a way to create a space, even if it's a fictional one, where all of these elements that make us, make sense. In the real world, when we're in Belgium, he's a Chinese guy and I'm a Black girl. When I'm in Martinique, I’m a tourist. When he's in Hong Kong, they ask him -

BP: ‘What are you?’, ‘What breed is this?’

CA: We created this world where all of these things make sense because we exist so it must make sense. It must be real. I think we have this need of describing our world to ourselves, and it's not justifying, but it's just confirming our existence.

BP: Yeah. If we can inspire people, but give people some insight into our world, then yeah, that would be nice.

CA: Also, as a minority, maybe that need is bigger than a British person living in London, or a cis-gendered white male. But the educational thing is a by-product. I would love it if people would be like, ‘Oh, I never thought of it that way’, or ‘I'm so happy you said it’. In the beginning, the initial thing was just for us to define ourselves and to emancipate. Saying ‘I understand Creole but I don't speak it’ doesn't make me less of a Creole person but that's something I always feel. When I'm in Belgium, I'm different, but I still exist. I always have the need to belong somewhere.

AM: Which songs were the most difficult to make?

BP: ‘Making Sense Stop’ took us a while. It was actually at the end of the process when we were looking back at the whole album, and we thought ‘what do we want to say now?’ I'm tired of hearing myself talk and have all of these opinions. We grabbed the Talking Heads album ‘Remain In Light’ and we were going through the lyrics, and while we were doing that, we thought about the Talking Heads film ‘Stop Making Sense’, which inspired this song. Charlotte wrote the first verse, in which she explained that she was done talking. Then we used the cut-up technique by William Burroughs until her sentences didn’t make any more sense. And on the third verse, we refresh the vocal and repeat several pieces of her voice. It's a playful homage to William Burroughs and David Byrne.

CA: And I think topically ‘Hey’ was a hard one. We wrote it during the lockdown. I was in my garden, we were FaceTiming, and we were like, ‘What's our intention, and how are we going to tell this story?’ so that wasn't easy. It took some time.

BP: But I'm really excited about that one as well. We try to portray the idea that the perfect human is made up of unity, vanity, variety -

CA: And equality.

BP: They just carry all of these personas and characters.

CA: We were trying to describe this dystopia - there's no conclusion but we ask ourselves a question. With this whole woke movement and cancel culture, if we were to obtain complete equality, how would people feel different? Even though every human is equal, should we strive towards complete uniformity? We have our concerns about trial by media and all of that, so that's why we wanted to describe it. To really check all the boxes of the goals we had while we made that song, it took some effort to really -

BP: Find the right words.

AM: How do you feel now that the project is finally coming out into the world?

BP: People can look at it and listen to it and use it - it's a bit weird. How many people will hear it? Five people are good but you strive for it to reach as many people as possible.

CA: It's a good comparison with a baby because when I gave birth, I felt on top of the world, and like a goddess that created life. But on the other hand, countless other people have done the same day, and a lot of other people will also release an album. To us, it's the biggest thing in the world, and it's so magical and so beautiful. And now it’s out, we get the chance to realise all the things we made without any intention and recognise that balance we have created.

Topical Dancer is out now on Deewee. Discover it here.

Words Aswan Magumbe
Photography Camille Vivier
Visit Charlotte Adigéry
Visit Bolis Pupul

Published on 06/03/2022