Wild swimming, the festival that shakes you up and down

While the bulk of humanity is crowded around Jamie XX at Rock en Seine and filming giant screens where successive images of cameras pointed at the audience, who thus have legally admissible proof that they are indeed living this moment, we are, as usual, in a predominantly rural department, marveling at a bald sixty-year-old blowing his violin. Welcome to Ambialet, a small town of 470 inhabitants where an exciting edition of the Baignade sauvage festival, born thirteen years ago in an abandoned swimming pool on the banks of the Tarn, is slowly coming to an end.

For four days, all sorts of strange music followed one another in places designed for completely different purposes: a landing stage, a bowling alley, a priory, a hydroelectric power station, an abandoned tunnel... A gentle start on Thursday evening with solo guitarists: one, Gwenifer Raymond, in cascades of fingerpicking, the other, Thibault Florent, who makes a supernatural gamelan out of his twelve-string guitar. The following days are punctuated by musical proposals rich in improvisation that gently grab the listener and allow themselves to demand more active listening - a moving reinterpretation of Hildegard von Bingen by Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko and Heinali, Dada ecstasy with Jean-François Vrod and Frédéric Le Junter united under the name of Plastron Kapok - while the evenings hit you unceremoniously, for better or for worse.