Lionel Marchetti - Train de Nuit
Dedicated to the father of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer, Lionel Marchetti's Train de Nuit (Noord 3-683) is a twenty-one minute composition mixing train signals, whispered voices, fragments of radio broadcasts and processed tones. Train de Nuit (Noord 3-683) is part of Metamkine's Cinéma pour l'oreille collection, a series of 3" CDs -- compact aural expressions -- that keep the musique concrète spirit alive. Train de Nuit (Noord 3-683) unfolds through one channel only and, while it is unfortunate that this experience isn't presented in full stereophonic sound to really seduce you with its aural environment, the effect of one channel only is that Marchetti's work whispers and hisses from your left speaker as if it is a mysterious signal that has found its way into your system without your knowledge.
Musique concrète is far from the lands of pop music, fluttering on the fringe of experimental composition where the songs are manufactured from found sounds. The engaging ambience of musique concrète is how it is both natural and unnatural, how it is a manufactured reality that has its own rhythms and melodies. Marchetti builds a symphony of distant rumbles, pierced by the shivering cry of train whistles and propelled by the grumbling sound of steam engines. Tiny melodies are provided by recorded voices. Marchetti creates the sounds of Train de Nuit (Noord 3-683) in an old school method of splicing tape loops and the abrupt edge of some of his loops is an unpolished roughness which makes the work seem that much more spontaneous.
About twelve minutes in, a distant radio drifts into the mix, playing the Doors' "Riders on the Storm." The radio signal is drowned out a minute or so later beneath French speaking voices and these voices are then lost beneath processed signals and noisy expulsions of steam from waiting trains. Marchetti's atmosphere drifts on, voices and sounds caught in its wake, their individual lines mingling and weaving together. The joy of listening to musique concrète is how the natural world becomes a musical experience, and Lionel Marchetti's Train de Nuit (Noord 3-683) will change how you visit a train station.
Metamkine [2002]
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