The 12-piece Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp from Geneva is currently on tour and will be performing in Vilnius.
The brainchild of Geneva-based Vincent Bertholet, founded in 2006, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp is a perpetually evolving ‘orchestra’, loosely modelled on the great 20th-century African groups like Tout Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou and tipping its hat to revolutionary French artist Marcel Duchamp.
On Bandcamp:
https://otpmd.bandcamp.com/album/ventre-unique
https://otpmd.bandcamp.com/album/ventre-unique
“Color” official video
https://youtu.be/DCZ9VTMSfUA?si=rgA4jVnhF7EShwqz
https://youtu.be/DCZ9VTMSfUA?si=rgA4jVnhF7EShwqz
“Dehors” live @ WFMU
https://youtu.be/Po7aj-pC_0A?si=AdWRLONmQtXLmS7r
https://youtu.be/Po7aj-pC_0A?si=AdWRLONmQtXLmS7r
“Tout cassé” live recording
https://youtu.be/owQZ669yryA?si=ne3ktcYKyUMZqDu0
https://youtu.be/owQZ669yryA?si=ne3ktcYKyUMZqDu0
BIOGRAPHY
« Plus personne ne sait faire du feu » (‘No one knows how to make fire anymore,’) we hear chanted-lamented in the middle of Coagule, one of the many French songs on Ventre unique (it’s a novelty, a beautiful one, a significant one), while elsewhere the twelve pyrotechnicians-delinquents of Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp strive to prove the opposite. An inflammatory object, and their sixth album in 18 years, Ventre unique is organised into eleven songs skilfully detonated into a vast repertoire of contemporary anxieties transformed into calls, explosions and deflagrations. Climatic spasms and general decline, particular stress and fear in varying degrees, varying amperages and varying saturation effects are thus articulated in childlike, poetic, cobbled-together, scribbled, tender and furious formulas by a plethora of voices (another new feature). Thus Liz Moscarola, violinist, storyteller and singer, alternately tightrope walker, stamping, friendly, exasperated; Gilles Poizat, bugle spitter and lunar barker; Vincent Bertholet, bow of the ship, double bassist and principal composer, hypnotised by his own litany of elegance and bewildered weariness. François Atlas pops his head in as a warm neighbour, just long enough for a strangely radiant Tout Haut, blowing eccentric bubbles of radioactive soap in a ringing tongue.
« Plus personne ne sait faire du feu » (‘No one knows how to make fire anymore,’) we hear chanted-lamented in the middle of Coagule, one of the many French songs on Ventre unique (it’s a novelty, a beautiful one, a significant one), while elsewhere the twelve pyrotechnicians-delinquents of Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp strive to prove the opposite. An inflammatory object, and their sixth album in 18 years, Ventre unique is organised into eleven songs skilfully detonated into a vast repertoire of contemporary anxieties transformed into calls, explosions and deflagrations. Climatic spasms and general decline, particular stress and fear in varying degrees, varying amperages and varying saturation effects are thus articulated in childlike, poetic, cobbled-together, scribbled, tender and furious formulas by a plethora of voices (another new feature). Thus Liz Moscarola, violinist, storyteller and singer, alternately tightrope walker, stamping, friendly, exasperated; Gilles Poizat, bugle spitter and lunar barker; Vincent Bertholet, bow of the ship, double bassist and principal composer, hypnotised by his own litany of elegance and bewildered weariness. François Atlas pops his head in as a warm neighbour, just long enough for a strangely radiant Tout Haut, blowing eccentric bubbles of radioactive soap in a ringing tongue.
The same goes for Aïda Diop, marimba player, who throws in a few sparkling vocal pins with the precision of a knife thrower. And finally, Mara Krastina, on holiday from the trio known as Massicot, who closes the show in her native Latvian and announces what’s to come, as we are told that she is now officially part of the group. All this under showers of thick choirs, amid the assaults of bouncing brass and angular electric guitar riffs, the marimba debris that enlarges the whole like rain enlarges the street through resonance and mirror effects. If Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp rubs genres together and alchemises their antagonistic motifs (tropical post-punk, Arthur Russell and raw calypso, binary music and odd rhythms, High Life and American minimalism, Dada folk songs, Mingus and ramshackle nursery rhymes, The Ex and Skeleton Crew) in order to, beneath its rowdy exterior, organise the great cacophony of the world into warm, inventive, hospitable forms.
Music before and after the concert selected by Sholto Dobie