Tuesday 12 December 2023, 7.30pm
Founded in 2006 by Vincent Bertholet (Hyperculte), the Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp is a large-scale project. Designed as a real orchestra, the size of the ensemble has varied over time. Now with 12 members, 14 in the past or 6 at the beginning, the ensemble has scoured the stages of Europe to demonstrate that the formula "the more the merrier" has never been more true than on stage.
Whether in prestigious festivals (Paléo Festival de Nyon, Fusion Festival, Incubate, Womad, Bad Bonn Kilbi, Jazz à la Vilette) or on the four albums released since its launch, the group shows an incredible fluidity. The Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp (a mischievous title in homage to traditional African groups - Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono n°1, Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrytmo etc... - and to one of the greatest dynamizers of 20th century art) embraces the forms of its musicians while pushing them to their limits. The result is a powerful, experimental, unstable and terribly alive, organic sound.
These characteristics can be found on We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway, fifth opus of the band. Built around twelve musicians, extirpated from their respective biotope, it develops a repetitive musicality which, deployed in successive waves, creates a feeling of trance. Mixing free jazz, post punk, high life, brass band, symphonic mixtures and kraut rock, their sound only goes beyond the limits of genre. Transcendental, almost ritualistic, the music is coupled with powerful lyrics, declaimed in rage against a world that is falling apart. Adorcist, hypnotic and post-syncratic, the Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, far from Tzara's manifesto, is somewhere between Hugo Ball's phonetic psalms, a Sufi procession that turns into a brawl and a voodoo ritual, but always with a precision proper to the monomania of an asperger.
"I would like to bring a new feature to your listening experience, and the concept of a “pop concert”. Electric wheelchairs, can have their own sound producing tools such as buzzers. Bubble wrap is used for wrapping delicate objects to send abroad. However, what happens when you tape this bubble wrap to the floor, you can create your own “pop-concert”. I will be experimenting with different sizes of bubbles. In addition to this “pop concert”, I will have a sound track of field-recordings. A photographer likes to seek for images, but I like to bend and record my own unique sounds which London has to offer. I take delight in arranging these sounds into compositions, and using computer generated sounds."