Traditional singing? No doubt about it, but frankly, much more than that. Dance songs that take you away into a smiling trance, overcoming all blockages, either corporal or mental. Virile ritornelles, sparkling with a saucy freshness. The six lads of this male choir from the district of La Plaine, in Marseilles, give the idea of tradition a salutary springiness. They revisit the occitan patrimony, they recreate it, inventing polyphony in it, and they transgress the idea you could have of it, injecting in it swing, groove and dissipated good humour. They accompany themselves with handclapping, foot stomping, bendirs and other skins. - P. Labesse - LE MONDE

Young living icons of an Occitan culture which fiercely defends its modernity, these singers project a lively and rejuvenated image of Provence with their traditional and popular songs. Lo Còr de la Plana offers an interpretation of the Occitan repertoire based on fury, fever, and the desire to challenge the notion of vocal music. - LE PENTHIEVRE

The vocals of Lo Còr de la Plana are sharp and rough, with an arid beauty. You enter into the dance and end up dumbfounded before all that controlled energy, power, sense of rhythm. That dissonance, leading to a remarkable harmony of fragility and sensitivity. Olivier Jourdan-Roulot - LE POINT

The entire concert (...) takes us off the beaten track. The intonations swing this way and that, the timbre of the voices deepens, and the ensemble never lets us go. To say that a C˜r de la Plana performance is the most disconcerting of all Provencal song concerts today is to state the obvious... - Pascal Jaussaud - MEDITERIA

Fervent chants reinvested with a mad energy and a singular, heady power. - Patrick Labesse - Le Monde

This is the long-awaited recording from the most original vocal quintet of the moment. These singers, grouped around Manu Théron, sing a capella on stage with occasional accompaniment from tambourines, their hands and their feet. (...) Their voices are tight and powerful with palpable substance to them, both proud and sensitive, as comfortable with melody as with shouting. (...) "Lo Còr de la Plana do not fantasise about an idyllic past that never existed; they are playing their part in the creation of modern Occitan music and a Mediterranean cultural heritage." We want more of the same, obviously. Claude Ribouillault - TRAD Magazine

Is this a secular choral visiting the crypts of religious music, or a pious polyphony enjoying the temptation of heresy in song ? Originally from the La Plaine district of Marseille, Lo Còr de la Plana have a traditional Provencal repertoire but infuse into it the urgency of our time. Les Inrockuptibles

Delicately weaving polyphony and polyrhythmia, the ensemble develops a humble architecture made of voices and bare hands (...). The complex edifice constructed by Lo Còr de la Plana also grabs the attention by revealing the mystery of this language that is unknown and yet so close. In the shared chants, the complex arabesques of intertwined voices and the simple rhythm of hands and feet, this language contains the seeds of its cultural revival. - LE PAVE

In the image of its leader, the Còr refuse to settle for sterile contemplation of a set form of expression: "I do not belong to that school that separates cultural demands from the political and social context", stresses Manu. "We want to be truly part of our quarter where a new awareness is emerging... And when we interpret religious songs, they tell the story of poor people standing up to the powerful. It is a struggle that never ends." - L'HEBDO DE MARSEILLE