Capparos/Marchetti (E53) : Entr’acte

Olivier Capparos and Lionel Marchetti
Livre des morts
CD (E53)

Composed in 2002–3 in the studios of Capparos and Marchetti and at
Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Arts as the soundtrack to the
Éric Pellet film Livre des morts.

“The Book of the Dead is a musical journey along the path that we all
must travel when, as humans, we confront our own mortality.”

Olivier Capparos is an instrumental and electro-acoustic composer
whose work encompasses philosophy and literature as well as music.
Many of his compositions are focused on voice and its interpretation
through loudspeakers. Capparos was composer in residence at the
INA-GRM in Paris (2001), the Studio National des Arts Contemporains
du Fresnoy (2002–3), and at the Argos Center in Bruxelles (2004).
He has composed and conducted works for chamber orchestra,
voice (soprano), violin, and piano, and has co-produced many other
recordings and radio broadcasts with Lionel Marchetti throughout
their long association.

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).

(Lionel Marchetti biography courtesy of François Couture.)

Video excerpt from Livre des morts