SUAL Archives | 2009
Lionel Marchetti: Portrait d’un glacier (Alpes, 2173m) — sound projection
Duration: 6‘58“ (excpt)
Type: Source recording provided by the artist
Credits: Excerpt from the album 10-33cm, published by ROOM40, 2008
Portrait d’un glacier (Alpes, 2173m)
“I used to hike mountains, (the Alps), and the first time I discovered the Glacier “Tré-la tête”, on Mont-Blanc, in France, with my friend Bruno Roche, I realized that we met a strange “vivacity”. This glacier is covered with stones, on a distance of 5 kilometers, at least. It’s a sort of desert where it’s possible to see, on the floor, near our feet, a strange blue eye looking at us, saying: “Do you want to know more about my face?” … In “Portrait d’un glacier (Alpes, 2173m)”, I tried to find the beauty of the mountain when it is able to give us an incredible geomorphic entity as the glacier; I tried to represent the breath of who is walking in such a beauty, dealing, in that way, with more than only his human condition – “the most difficult area” – ; but with not forgetting this idea of “panic” I can feel since mountain means danger too, archaism that I can feel under my feet, which at some times could destroy me only with a breath…” [Lionel Marchetti]
Lionel Marchetti
Lionel Marchetti was born in France in 1967. His interest in music resides in the qualities of sound. He started to experiment by himself and later discovered the rich French corpus of musique concrète through Xavier Garcia. He is one of a handful of artists who in the mid-to-late 1990s took electro-acoustic music out of academic studios and into the free improvisation ring. A scholar who worked at the CFMI (Lyon) and INA-GRM studios and published a book on acousmatic composer Michel Chion, Marchetti developed a set-up of microphones and loudspeakers he uses on stage along with tape recorders, prepared CDs, motors and radios. He often refers to his instruments as an ‘electro-acoustic contraption’. His musique concrète studio work incorporates sound collage and academic electro-acoustic composition, though the level of poetry and refusal of genre boundaries in his music puts him closer to Kristoff K. Roll and Luc Ferrari than Pierre Henry or Bernard Parmegiani. Following his encounter with Metamkine label owner and fellow sound experimentalist Jérôme Noetinger in the early 1990s, a series of live and improvisation-based projects would run parallel to his more academic career. The Marchetti-Noetinger duo was the first of such projects and remains the longest lasting one. They are also involved in the audio-visual project Le Cube. In addition, Marchetti performs with the influential improv collective Archipel (with Emmanuel Petit, Sophie Agnel, Fabrice Charles, Pascal Bathus, and Werchowski). [biography courtesy of François Couture]
https://lionelmarchetti.bandcamp.com
[info as of 12/2009]