Strasbourg Music Week Meet the artists
Jean-Noël Scherrer (Last Train) and Bertrand Belin
Through a joint discussion between two artists, Eli Finberg gets them to talk about their journeys and mentorship: why, how, and who? The aim is to allow the audience (emerging artists mostly) to ask questions and find answers.
Curator : Eli Finberg
Originally from New York, Eli Finberg, aka Mr. E, grew up during the golden age of hip-hop. In 2005, after studying poetry and political science and spending extensive time abroad, he settled in Strasbourg.
He started by rapping in the streets, participating in jams, and developing his first musical projects. A versatile artist, he excels at rapping over various musical genres such as jazz, flamenco, rock, electro, and more. Mr. E is or has been part of a dozen projects in France, Wales, and Belgium, including Goldencut, Mojo Sapiens, FreeZ, and Art District. He has performed over 600 concerts in Europe, Morocco, and the United States.
Mr. E has been organizing Freestyle Mondays, a monthly open mic in Strasbourg, since 2011. He regularly conducts workshops where he emphasizes traditional hip-hop values : non-violence, tolerance, social inclusion, and artistic expression and innovation.
Deeply committed to the message conveyed through music, he practices a thoughtful, introspective, and assertive form of rap.
Jean-Noël Scherrer
Jean-Noël Scherrer, Last Train's singer and guitarist, is also the founder of Cold Fame.
This Lyon-based concert production and promotion agency develops tours for bands such as Bandit Bandit, Lysistrata, MNNQNS, Last Train, as well as artists like Hubert Lenoir, Paul Jacobs, Alias, and many others from around the world.
He is notably the initiator of the "Messes," monthly concerts in Lyon with a radically rock aesthetic, and the La Messe de Minuit festival.
For the past two years, he has also been the coordinator of Last Train Productions, the production entity for all of the band's activities, which is now entirely independent. Producer, tour manager, and artist, this young entrepreneur wears many hats, staying away from institutional rhetoric and driven by a passion for music as well as its means of dissemination.
Bertrand Belin
Known as a singer-musician, author, and composer, Bertrand Belin pursues numerous diverse projects alongside his "official" career, combining literature and music with theater, dance, and cinema. His distinctive voice and phrasing, key markers of his French pop, are also evident in his writings. His latest book, "Vrac," published in 2020 by POL, mixes fragmentary prose and poems to explore memory and bring back the sediments of a childhood rooted in a popular and provincial France of the 1970s. Songs, anecdotes, statements, adages, definitions, thoughts—every language is good to express, serving as the marker of the invisible made visible, of the necessary turned into literature.
Bertrand Belin will share this voice imbued with freedom, the same that gave its name to his first album in 2005, of chaos transformed into textual material in his fourth book, "Vrac," and of his artistic grounding confirmed up to his seventh album, "Tambour Vision," released in 2022, another remedy for contemporary melancholy.