Photography: Adam Faraday

The first time I meet Marylise Frecheville and Eric Boros, they appear out of the night, winter coats zipped up, backpacks strung with guitar and cymbals, rolled-up bedding in hand. They are tired and unhappy. They relate their last 48 hours; paired with terrible bands at some godforsaken venue up north, underpaid by a promoter, let down by the capricious scheduling of the crumbling British railway network. I find myself wondering why people might live this way, toss themselves at the mercy of a merciless world. But Marylise shrugs it off: "This is the life we chose."

Later, dressed in traditional clothes that make them look like medieval serfs, they play. Eric prances and kicks his heels, his fingers dancing exotic motifs across his fretboard, echoes of gypsy folk, Eastern melodies and African song, product of a nomadic muse. Marylise sings with an earthy, Frenchaccented voice that belies her slight size, bounds out from behind her drums to recite story-songs, and returns behind the kit to beat out mini tornadoes of percussion. That night, Vialka sleep in my lounge. We exchange email addresses, and the next morning, they leave, bound for the station, and the wide world swallows them up once more.

Twenty-nine months later, I ring the doorbell of a house in Brixton. I don’t know the woman who answers, but Eric recognises me and welcomes me in. As I enter, Marylise pads down the stairs, beaming, thirsty baby clamped to her breast. At just five months old, Ildiko – who shares the name of the last wife of Atilla The Hun, but that’s mere coincidence – is already experiencing life as part of the Vialka touring party. If this is as much a project as a band – as its creators have it, a "Social scientific experiment, attempting to meet, communicate and work with extraordinary musicians and artists from everywhere and nowhere, with particular interest in polluted dictatorships, bleak colonies and monarchic democracies" – you feel this Vialka are now, offstage at least, a trio.

After dinner, we relocate to the lounge. Eric has made me promise not to ask 'the boring questions'. "So the first," he deadpans, "is why did you start the band?" And he breaks into peals of laughter. "Stop fucking with him, Eric," tuts Marylise. So – why did you start the band? Laughter. "We played music together first," explains Marylise. "We were crammed in a car together for several tours before we were together. Together, we were in a punk band…"

"…I wouldn’t go so far as a punk band," interrupts Eric. "I was living in a squat in Switzerland when Marylise and Titi, this French guitar player, showed up. They needed a bass player, so I just started playing with them, and a month later, we recorded an LP. I just kind of jumped on that."

That band, NNY, split in 2002. Marylise and Eric, now lovers, relocated to a farmhouse in rural France, from where they practised, planned recordings and plotted more and more distant and adventurous tours, an attempt to experience the world’s underside. "I call it menestrels," explains Marylise. "There is a song on the new album called that. It is about going around and talking to people and discovering the information we get from the media can be very different from what people actually witness and do."

Vialka’s travels have taken them across Asia, Africa, North America, Australia and New Zealand, and all over Europe. "I love travelling," says Eric. "But the more I travel the more I increasingly see the limitations. When you go somewhere, you go with films already in your mind – you see the things you think you are going to see. Now, you just need to step off anywhere to see the whole world is covered in Lonely Planet-toting backpackers."

"There's something very different between travelling and touring," agrees Marylise. "Because when we go somewhere to play, we are sharing stuff with people," adds Eric. "You have this really incredible trust relationship. You’ve just shared an email but all of a sudden you find yourself on the other side of the world in their house. It gives me an incredible faith in humanity, a faith that otherwise is quite difficult to find."

As well as geography, Vialka are fascinated by history, or more specifically, lineage: oral history, the relation of tales, and the connection a band has with its forefathers, or will have on future generations. And like Sun City Girls or The Ex, their experience loops directly back into their music.

"It's hard to say we're influenced by Malian griot, or we're influenced because Marylise's mother was an opera singer in Paris," says Eric "This is important, I think. I got a tape in the mail in 1993 that blew my mind and I started doing strange stuff from it but no one necessarily talks about this stuff. It doesn’t work in a tradition. In Mali, the family that’s been playing the kora for 20 generations, there’s a context of past and continuity. Speaking of something as part of the past and making it go forward into the future."

Are people more shaped by their genes, or by their experience?

Eric: "A good question! I like it very much."

Marylise: "I can only talk about my experiences. I was raised to be a logic person, always very good at maths and physics. My parents are the perfect couple from the good years in the Sixties. We call them in French les trente glorieuse, the 30 good years after the end of the war. Two people with good jobs and a house on the outskirts of the city. I studied architecture. But suddenly I became a musician. Maybe it's the fact that my father's family were musicians, but I don’t know any of them. But my dad was abandoned, I did look for his mum but I could not find her."

So maybe there's something dormant?

Marylise: "The brain is a genetic thing too, the chemicals and the gender…"

Eric: "You can think of a human being as like empty, with no thoughts inside it, but everything in your mind comes from your experience. Genes might be there to treat the information you receive in a certain way, but there’s so much more influence from experience."

Do you consider Vialka a political band?

Marylise: "I think art in general is necessarily political. Even just form or shape itself can reveal a political aspect of the mind of the artist."

Eric: "From where I'm from in Canada, the music scene was very influenced by this identity politics thing – riot grrrls, straight edgers, Chumbawumbaism, as I heard someone say. At the time that question would have strong importance. Now, I would say no. I feel like our creative impulse and way of living could be perceived as being very political, but it’s just us trying to be as true to ourselves. If I was to say were were a political band it would be like we were removing something from ourselves and putting it on a shelf."

Marylise: "What we make is very organic, it grows in every direction. Politics is part of it. But it is intricate."

Marylise, ever-industrious, has had difficult adjusting to motherhood. "I had to give the boob all day, and I couldn’t do anything – at the beginning I was really stressed about it, I have to do something, I have to be productive! I had a really hard time getting used to it." Just months after Ildiko's birth, then, Vialka returned to the Pyrenees to complete their new album Plus Vite Que La Musique.

"The title means many things in French," explains Marylise. "But the straight translation is 'Faster than the musi'. It's what you say when somebody tells you something but they don't tell you all the steps that led to the statement. It can also mean doing too many things stressfully. The title just felt like something in the air. The world is in a machine, going faster and faster, and everyone's pressed against the wall."

Maybe sometimes, the only way to find your niche is to pack your bag, hit the road, and try to keep up.