Lionel Marchetti

[tadk]

I think he deserves his own thread, so I decided to post a new topic. I'm looking forward to your recommendations and opinions (especially regarding his early stuff).

I can only recommend some of his latest works (e.g. "Adèle et Hadrien (Le Livre des Vacances)", "Red Dust" or "Train de nuit (Noord 3-683)") , because I haven't heard most of his discs released in the 20th century.

[cleanzero]

I like this one.





LIONEL MARCHETTI / EMMANUEL PETIT "DOCTEUR KRAMER

[Richard Pinnell]

I don't have much early material from Marchetti either, The earliest item I have is the 1992-93 three inch disc that was part of the Metamkine Cinema pour l'Oreille series entitled Mue. Its a great piece that uses what appears to be recordings of a young boy's voice rather than the field recordings he later became more reliant upon. Amusingly, back then when I bought this, for some reason I thought Marchetti was a much older Concréte composer and this was an archive recording...

I agree with Alfio about that disc with Petit, a good one, as is their disc on Absurd with Christophe Cardoen added to make a trio. The title is something in French about fires. Right now I can't find the disc to give you its exact title, but its here somewhere, it can't hide forever...

[washline]

My copy of Train de nuit (Noord 3-683) has no music coming out of the right channel. I've played it several times in order to be sure of this. Anyone else notice this on their recording? Is it intentional or perhaps a problem in the pressing?

[Richard Pinnell]

I just checked mine and its the same, only one channel. I hadn't noticed before. Odd.

Whilst digging that out I found that Absurd disc too, its called Mere feu 40 tetes

[Dohol]

I have not heard any Marchetti..I'm curious.

[bullock]

I believe Train de Nuit is deliberately in mono - if I recall correctly (I suppose I could look it up) it was made for an installation of a single loudspeaker.

Short plug - Lionel has a 3" CD on my label, Chloë, called Dans La Montaigne (Ki Ken Taï). It's from the mid-90s, roughly the same period as the CDs on the Cinéma pour l'Oreille series. It's sold out from me but Metamkine might still have a few at this point.

Also, he's got a killer new release on Intransitive.

[washline]

That's an odd way to do mono in these days. I'm surprised he didn't just fill both channels with the same info.

I like the recording he did with Noetinger and Voice Crack on Grob, Double Wash as well as the work with Agnel and Noetinger on Potlatch. I also have the duo with Noetinger, Mort aux Vaches on Staalplaat, but it's been a long time since I listened to it. The 3-inch CDs of Marchetti are all pretty good as I recall.

[Dan Warburton]

I believe Train de Nuit is deliberately in mono

It is.

They sell out very quickly, these Marchettis. Rightly so. Red Dust is my favourite.

Below the text that appeared in The Wire last year, for reference.

"I like to work on several projects at once," says French musique concrète composer Lionel Marchetti. "Nuances only reveal themselves over time. Composing is a slow process of learning about something strange which retreats as you approach it. It's not like frying an egg. I simmer things over a gentle heat." Since his studies with Xavier Garcia at the CFMI studios in Lyon, where he created his first work Sirrus in 1990, Marchetti has cooked up an impressive body of music, much of it sourced from recordings of a 1950s Radiola lamp radio he discovered in his early teens. "It has a very warm sound and a range of filters that are precise and rich. And it's mono, which draws you into its intimacy."
This was the principal sound source for Kitnabudja Town, released in 1996 on Jérôme Noetinger's Metamkine label under the pseudonym Roger de la Frayssenet, a huge sprawling apocalyptic megamix of sounds from all over the planet, "an immense cacophony, like listening to all the radios in the world at the same time." It's a vision not unlike the dream of world music that inspired Stockhausen's 1966 masterpiece Telemusik, but whereas Telemusik filtered its ethnic sources into a tight fifteen minutes, Marchetti's city of sound is sprawling and chaotic. "I had a huge number of tapes of all kinds of stuff, including things by Prince, Pierre Henry, Madonna and James Brown. I've never declared the piece officially and don't make royalties from it," he adds. "I had to become someone else before I felt free enough to do it." A new version – credited to Marchetti this time – will be released on Monotype early next year.
The three-inch CD format of Metamkine's Cinéma pour l'Oreille collection has proved particularly attractive to Marchetti; in addition to three releases in the series – Mue (1993), La grande vallée (1997) and Train de Nuit (2002) – he's released mini-CDs on Erewhon (2002's Riss), Chloë (2003's Dans la montagne), and Crouton Music (last year's triple three-incher Red Dust). "Musique concrète suits the three-inch format like poetry suits the printed page – there's a unity, a density to it, a single piece on the disc. It's like a slim volume of poetry."
That's a perfect description of Red Dust, which despite Marchetti's description of it as "a sketchbook full of tiny drawings" is a carefully constructed and moving 70-minute span of music. In addition to police radios, nocturnal insects, crackling firewood, creaking furniture, scratchy old recordings of military bands and barrel organs, and all manner of voices, Marchetti quotes sparingly but tellingly from the work of artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Keiji Haino, This Heat and Marie Dubas, a Parisian cabaret singer who lost her family in the concentration camps. His use of her singing is both melancholy and unsettling. Indeed, though titles like Portrait d’un glacier (Alpes, 2173m) and Dans la Montagne might conjure up visions of Harold In Italy romanticism, Marchetti's use of field recordings is often disturbing. On Dans La Montagne, the swish of bamboo poles and cries of students practising Kendo become positively scary, as Marchetti's careful sequencing opens up a multiplicity of possible narratives. It's not so much cinema for the ear as poetry for the ear – not surprisingly the composer is fond of quoting Scottish poet Kenneth White: "I like the abstract where a memory of substance remains, and the concrete that refines itself at the edge of the void."
Marchetti remains attached to the term "musique concrète". "It refers to the pioneering works of Schaeffer, Henry and Ferrari which I still feel attached to. I believe in the idea of tradition, of passing on knowledge and ideas as this "art of fixed sounds" (Michel Chion) develops and grows. Musique concrète still lacks enlightened criticism." Marchetti has not only written on Chion's work (La Musique Concrète de Michel Chion, Metamkine 1998), but also collaborated with him and Jérôme Noetinger on 2003's Les 120 Jours (Fringes).
Another frequent collaborator is poet Olivier Capparos, with whom Marchetti has created numerous hörspiels as part of Radio France's Atelier de Création Radiophonique. Though most set out to explore a specific theme, the pair's latest collaboration, the impressively austere Equus (Grand Véhicule), to be released shortly on Sub Rosa, "started from nothing. It's a kind of spaceship flying into a strange abstract landscape." But Marchetti is just as attached to real landscape. For the past seven years he's recorded his own children, gathering material for his most substantial work to date, Adèle et Hadrien, a 135 minute long work in several tableaux which follows them on walks in the mountains and into dark caves late at night. "It's a sort of homage to my childhood too," Marchetti admits, "like setting off down an unknown path with a bar of chocolate in your pocket."
Another path Marchetti has followed is improvisation, often in the company of Jérôme Noetinger. They began exploring the innards of Noetinger's broken piano with cassette players, radios and various household objects in 1993, and their work together first appeared on Ralf Wehowsky's epic 5CD Tulpas project in 1998, since when they've joined forces with violinist Mathieu Werchowski (2000's Trio on Corpus Hermeticum), the Swiss electronics duo of Voice Crack (2001's Double Wash on Grob), pianist Sophie Agnel (Rouge Gris Bruit on Potlatch from the same year) and most recently with electronicians Jean Pallandre, Marc Pichelin and Laurent Sassi in the Quintet Avant (two albums have appeared on Editions Mego).
Another improvisation with percussionist Seijiro Murayama provided the raw material for the forthcoming Intransitive release Hatali Atsalei (l’échange des yeux). The title refers to a 19th century American Indian shaman, so it's fitting that Intransitive will also be reissuing Marchetti's Knud Un nom de serpent (2001), his extraordinary collage of spoken word and ritual music from Asia and Africa inspired by Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. "I've always been interested in the idea of the medecine man," he enthuses. "Someone who by sheer force of imagination transports you into another world, part artist, part healer. Maybe that's what a composer is."

[jon abbey]

Kitnabudja Town, released in 1996 on Jérôme Noetinger's Metamkine label under the pseudonym Roger de la Frayssenet

this is a good one, I've sold a lot of these over the years.

[Dan Warburton]

Kitnabudja Town, released in 1996 on Jérôme Noetinger's Metamkine label under the pseudonym Roger de la Frayssenet

this is a good one, I've sold a lot of these over the years.

Impressive for sure, but I wouldn't say typical. Haven't heard the revised version.. is it out yet?

[aldo]

I don't have much early material from Marchetti either, The earliest item I have is the 1992-93 three inch disc that was part of the Metamkine Cinema pour l'Oreille series entitled Mue. Its a great piece that uses what appears to be recordings of a young boy's voice rather than the field recordings he later became more reliant upon. Amusingly, back then when I bought this, for some reason I thought Marchetti was a much older Concréte composer and this was an archive recording...

I agree with Alfio about that disc with Petit, a good one, as is their disc on Absurd with Christophe Cardoen added to make a trio. The title is something in French about fires. Right now I can't find the disc to give you its exact title, but its here somewhere, it can't hide forever...

It's a piece for one speaker. So that's normal.
A lot of electroacoustic composers are working in multi channel (like 8 tracks or more), so the idea here was to do something different.
And Jerome Noetinger did the same. At first the idea was to put Lionel's on the right and Jerome on the left, but they skipped the idea thinking that a lot of people have not the balance on their stereo...

[aldo]

I don't have much early material from Marchetti either, The earliest item I have is the 1992-93 three inch disc that was part of the Metamkine Cinema pour l'Oreille series entitled Mue. Its a great piece that uses what appears to be recordings of a young boy's voice rather than the field recordings he later became more reliant upon. Amusingly, back then when I bought this, for some reason I thought Marchetti was a much older Concréte composer and this was an archive recording...

I agree with Alfio about that disc with Petit, a good one, as is their disc on Absurd with Christophe Cardoen added to make a trio. The title is something in French about fires. Right now I can't find the disc to give you its exact title, but its here somewhere, it can't hide forever...

It is one of his oldest. (the oldest ones are edited by auscultare under the name sirrus - pieces from 1989-90). The young boy you here is an adult with a illness... and Lionel told me some time ago that he's dead from his illness now.

The one with Christophe Cardoen and Emmanuel Petit is called "Mere feu 40 tête".

[Dan Warburton]

.

The one with Christophe Cardoen and Emmanuel Petit is called "Mere feu 40 tête".

OOP, like all good Absurds

[washline]

OOP, like all good Absurds

The greatest absurdity of all.

[tadk]

Kitnabudja Town, released in 1996 on Jérôme Noetinger's Metamkine label under the pseudonym Roger de la Frayssenet

this is a good one, I've sold a lot of these over the years.

Impressive for sure, but I wouldn't say typical. Haven't heard the revised version.. is it out yet?

no, it isn't

[Dan Warburton]

Lionel just sent me three cool links:


http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll11-GpE0bs" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;
http://forets.chez-alice.fr/welcome.html" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=_3yLZYx_bog" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;

[Dan Warburton]

Don't know what that onclickref html junk is in the previous message but the links work OK

[washline]

Incunabulum

Great name for a label.

[kangaroo?]

.

The one with Christophe Cardoen and Emmanuel Petit is called "Mere feu 40 tête".

OOP, like all good Absurds

yes, i think that one was in the ridiculously-limited sub-series too . a very nice recording. Seriously though, there are new good absurds that have taken the place of those old OOP ones. get those & let others whine later