LIONEL MARCHETTI / SEIJIRO MURAYAMA
Hatali Atsalei (L’Echange des Yeux)
(Intransitive - INT031) CD $13.00
For his second album on Intransitive, Lionel Marchetti returns to his favorite subject: music as an essential element of ritual and ecstatic trance states. Unlike his Knud un Nom du Serpent CD (to be reissued in Spring 2008), which offers a critique of avant-garde and popular music as an extension of the transcendental impulse, Hatali Atsalei is more literally an experience of ritual. Using percussion, wind instruments, field recordings of natural sounds, and most importantly the voice of collaborator Seijiro Murayama, Marchetti once again gives us a multi-leveled engagement with the elemental urge to converse with nature and to use sound as a means to achieve altered states of consciousness. Referencing narrative radio art, musique concrete and acoustic ecology, Hatali Atsalei is a fascinating work that reveals more layers with each listen.
Knud un Nom de Serpent (Le Cercle des Entrailles)
(Intransitive - INT014) Used CD $4.00
Marchetti's classic album of harrowing tape music was originally released Intransitive in 1999, quickly sold out, and remains the most requested title in the label's catalog. This reissue boasts a new cover design and liner notes by Bhob Rainey (nmperign, The BSC). Knud un Nom de Serpent illustrates Marchetti's idea of popular music as shamanic ritual, a gateway to ecstatic altered states. Armed with fierce wit and a razor blade, he smashes together sounds from all over the world into a hallucinatory cyclone of Jamaican reggae, French chanson, American avant-garde vocalists, Thai pop songs, nature recordings, spoken text, and more. The result is a chilling work of furious, obliquely narrative tape-collage and tense, frightening scenes.
LIONEL MARCHETTI / JÉRÔME NOETINGER / MATHIEU WERCHOWSKI
Marchetti / Noetinger / Werchowski
(Corpus Hermeticum - HERMES034) Used CD $7.00 (Out-of-stock)
Marchetti and Noetinger on tape decks, amplifiers, and “kick up an impressively varied array of whizzes, scrapes, whistles, groans, blips, and bleeps, all dynamically arranged,” says Dusted, “With both intuitive intelligence and a fine appreciation for a good racket. Werchowski tends to assert himself [on violin] by holding one texture or gesture while the sounds of electricity and metal under duress surge around him -- his conservatory trained technique makes him the one idiomatic voice in an untranslatable babel.”
Sirrus
(Auscultare Research) Used CD $8.00
“Marchetti’s music abstracts sounds at points equal to Schaeffer and Ferrari,” according to a noted Dusted guest lecturer, “But an even closer reference point is Stockhausen’s Sans la Soleil…, although [it] channels more eclectic sources…. In “Passerele,” a fragment of wild organ brings a moment of warmth to a landscape of analog blurbs. [On] “Sirrus,” … sped-up sounds …balance … the darker drones below…. “Micro-climat”… uses a structure closer to field recordings than the abstract sequences of distortions that make up much concrète. Perhaps Marchetti owes a little to the acoustic-ecology of R. Murray Schafer … [though] Marchetti seems less worried … about decorating casual listening environments with a conceptual premise. Sirrus is a complex work, with each segment unfolding into a recurring motif of ambient noises…. [A] challenging, rewarding, and engaging experience….” From 2002. Sealed
XAVIER CHARLES / JEAN-PHILIPPE GROSS / FRANZ HAUTZINGER / LIONEL MARCHETTI
TSSTT!
(Monotype - MONO048) CD $14.00
“TSSTT matches the textures emanating from the electric-acoustic devices of … Gross [and] the tape recorder and short-wave sounds of musique concrète composer Marchetti,” says Jazzword, “With the acoustic contributions of clarinetist Charles and quarter-tone trumpeter Hautzinger…. Short-wave signals and computer-game-styled buzzing and explosions … reveal distinctive concussion-like impulses…. [A]lso audible are bugle-like triplets from Hautzinger and pseudo dog yelps from Charles’s clarinet…. [W]hile blurry loops and an undertow of tape-machine buzzing predominates on other tracks – along with unexpected gun-shot like pops – so do aleatory and contrapuntal acoustic squeak and peeps…. [A]ir-filled vibrations … gradually turn to harsher, narrower sine waves with tandem instrumental extensions…, escalating and burbling timbres from Gross’s … devices and flanged abrasions from Marchetti’s motor-driven Revox join with the horns’ multiphonic hisses and whistles.”
Une Saison
(Monotype - MONO036) CD $18.00 (Out-of-stock)
Four previously released tracks of fantastic musique concrète: La grande vallée (Metamkine 1998); Portrait d'un glacier (Alpes, 2173m) (Ground Fault Recordings 2001); Dans la montagne (Ki Ken Taï) (La Muse En Circuit 1997 and Chloë Recordings 2003); and L'oeil retourné (Selektion, 1999). All are elaborately composed galaxies of static and aggressive, self-sustaining sound explorations. The more sensitive among us will admit to feeling paralyzed by the swiftness of the reactions of the sounds from one layer to the next in Marchetti’s “microtonal stance of sound snorkeling.” Michel Chion says, “To my mind, the characteristics of numerous compositions by Lionel Marchetti, including those featured in this collection, are fullness and perfection, a design both obscure and transparent at the same time, so typical of a classic work.” Tri-folded cardboard jacket, sixteen-page booklet with Chion's "The Suspension Bridges.”