Name: Ndox Electrique
Members: Awa Mbodji (vocals), Ndeye Coumba Mbaye Kebe (vocals), Oumar Ngom (nder, mbëng-mbëng, thiol, tama & choir), Mouhamet "Sangue" Sambe (nder, mbëng-mbëng, thiol, tama & choir), Mamadou "Pape" Ngom (nder, mbëng-mbëng, thiol, tama & choir), Cheikh Ma Djimbira "N'digueul" Ndiaye (nder, mbëng-mbëng, thiol, tama & choir), Aida Touré (sabar & choir), Rokhaya “Madame” Diène (vocals), Adjaratou "Oumou" Diène (choir), Mar Faye (mbëng-mbëng), Ndiaga Mboup (tunguné & tama), Abdou Seck (thiol & talmbath), Gianna Greco (bass, choir, computer & videos), François R. Cambuzat (guitars, choir, computer & videos)
Interviewee: François R. Cambuzat
Nationalities: French, Italian, Senegalese
Current release: Ndox Electrique's Tëdd ak Mame Coumba Lamba ak Mame Coumba Mbang is out November 3rd 2023 via Bongo Joe.  
Recommendations: Let’s make it at least 3: Gilbert Rouget - La musique et la transe; Álvaro de Campos - Ode maritime; Tobia D’Onofrio – Rave new world. L'ultima controcultura.

If you enjoyed this Ndox Electrique interview and would like to find out more about the collective and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Facebook. For François R. Cambuzat's personal website, go here.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

What a great question, Tobias, no one usually cares about that. For my part, it of course depends on the music, the time and the place. At home I manage to have silence, so what happens is much more introspective.

French impressionism, Arvo Pärt, Pharoah Sanders/Floating Points or the falak from Tajikistan …. the best moments are (very) early in the morning and (very) late in the evening, eyes open, straight on the night, nose on the scents of the Senegal river in Podor or the forests of Mazury when our homes are there, and the body on alert.

Most often with your eyes open on the roads, with other music (Jennifer Lopez at 5 a.m. after 10 hours of driving is perfect.) Painkiller, Big Brave or Haino Keijo are for other times and the body will scream. Of joy. Cathartic.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

What interests me most are the musics that I hardly understand. I then love to study, wildly and intensely.

Starting from punk at 12, prog and jazz then challenged me, then it was years of fascination for improvised music, then for classical music (years of study in Amsterdam with Ruud Kok), then contemporary classical (first slap with Messiaen and everything else then rushed in), then oriental music and the ear on quarter tones (years at the ISM in Tunis), finally the extreme social role of different rituals, in years lived from Xinjiang to the Indian Ocean via Djerid, Dersim or Senegal. The original violence of these musics and what they bring to society, far from mere entertainment.

“Being an artist”, what is it in the end? Life is way too short.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

At the beginning, music and writing (literature) were for me a means of traveling freely, without orders, without schedules and without bosses. Free to run away from home at around 16, free to starve in New York or London, and also free to believe that it was possible to rebuild a family other than that of the blood.

What remained are the journeys, the farthest and most impossible possible, absurd and often badly paid. Stay there for months if not years. Then the road trips, for breathing a spring in the North of Europe, some winter in the Maghreb or West Africa, etc …

What on the other hand has changed – if not disappeared – is this idea of “family”. Nothing very true. Enormous difficulties finding brothers and sisters who will not look at you as an opportunity or a walking-wallet.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

Curiosity, research, studies, travel. If possible avoid the hubs and highways of culture as Western society understands it. Escape sadness and tedium vitae. Learn, destroy, redo. Violence and dancing. Resist.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

Discovery, and most often by chance. Often behind the wheel or in an airport waiting room. Sometimes in creation, hands on the guitar, but other times with challenge, eyes closed, hands traveling alone and at random.

But always now with the body, it must move and avoid the churches of so-called intelligent music (most often extremely banal and reductive, in fact) and the highways of any kind of musical genre.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

There are several, precisely because of this perpetual curiosity. But for the past ten years, it is first and foremost the body that must react. The Heart too, of course, and when I need tears they have to flow.

Overall sound is important, but not the primary importance; it comes afterwards, during another type of creativity, that one of phonics, of putting the sounds together (mixing, mastering).

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

Silence. Which unfortunately does not exist naturally.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

It's neither the sounds nor the structures that really interest me, but much more the social result of it all put together. This is exactly why certain rituals of possession (in Asia, Africa) fascinate us, because it is another way of experiencing music, besides just listening.

But being together, doing each other good, scaring each other, maybe healing each other. It is now the social roles of music that interest us.

The technique, honestly, we don't care. A Senegalese griot does not know what he is playing. But he knows very well WHY he is playing it.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

My most accomplished song - in my opinion - is “kashgar 13,” our first research in Xinjiang, in the Taklamakan desert and the Karakoram mountains with the shamans.

A simplicity: a single chord with two fingers (Am), repeated - but devilishly counted. And no one knows it, no one notices it. It's very simple, but at the same time complicated, but you can't understand it.

No one cares and that's exactly what's beautiful.



Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

Not anymore. Gianna and I are looking for the duende.

The experiment is perhaps to live in misery for months in rotten houses with simple people who touch and violently defy the sky.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

We make music because we need it. Then music managed to pay for what we need to survive.

Having clarified this, I don't think music reflects the way we live our lives. Except our love for exploration, both artistic and geographical, with all the challenges that this brings for people who are far from being rich. Music therefore does not reflect our way of living but it is our way of living, and the meaning of our life.

It probably sounds stupid, but without music or writing I would either be dead or interned in a psychiatric hospital.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Music is a means found to support life, to make it acceptable if not happy. It is essential, so yes, it has nothing to do with a cup of coffee or a vintage champagne.

Gianna and I are surely idiots: we will risk everything for a poorly paid gig at Konibodom or a long period of creative work without profit, as long as it makes us daydream strongly.

“Mundane” tasks can be wonderful but are quickly dispatched. We can of course derive pleasure from it but certainly not a dream.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

More and more the music  (falsely) simple but obvious. Cuckoo by Britten. Syrinx by Debussy. Or "Half Breed" by Big Brave.



If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

The music industry should first of all disappear, with all its mechanical means of reproducing (and selling) music. Musical fashions and churches should then lose their meaning.

The emotion and magic should finally return.