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Miriodor: “Funambule” (“Tightrope Walker”)

From the album Jongleries Élastiques (1996)

Formed in Quebec City in 1980, Miriodor is a Canadian band that has been based for most of its existence in Montreal.  The group has undergone numerous personnel changes since its first album, Rencontres, released in 1986.  Pascal Globensky (keyboards, acoustic guitar) and Rémi Leclerc (drums) are the only two members to have participated in every Miriodor release.  In 2009, they finished their seventh album, entitled Avanti!.

Miriodor fuses jazz virtuosity and prog-rock ambitiousness with a certain playful and fantastic quality which I hope I will be forgiven for hearing as quintessentially French.  Their music has a polished, MIDI-fied sheen that may be a turnoff for those who didn’t grow up listening to video game music.

This should appeal to fans of previous Acousmata features Hellebore, Magma, and Univers Zero (for whom Miriodor recently opened at the Sonic Circuits festival in Washington DC).

November 04, 2010, 2:48pm

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Heldon: “Interface (Live at the Palace 1978), Part I” 

From the album Interface (1977)

Founded in 1974 in Paris, Heldon was the brainchild of French guitarist/keyboardist Richard Pinhas.  Pinhas has a remarkable background for a rock musician celebrated as the “father of electronic music in France”:  in the late 60s, before he was known as a musician, he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he received a PhD under the tutelage of the renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.  Deleuze, who was deeply interested in music, would later make a guest appearance reading a text on the track “Ouais Marchais mieux qu’en 68 (Le voyageur)” from Heldon’s 1974 debut album Electronique Guérilla.

After completing his doctorate, Pinhas taught for a year at the Sorbonne before abandoning academia and committing himself to his musical projects.  His primary group, Heldon, released seven albums between 1974 and 1979. From 1976 to 1982, Pinhas made an additional five records under his own name.  His music from this period can be described as a stylistic fusion of the developmental, guitar-oriented progressive-rock tendencies (King Crimson being a major influence) with the centripetal, loop-based aesthetic of early electronica (Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk).  This track is much more representative of the former style, including some impressive guitar noodling by Pinhas.

Beyond the substantial influence of his music, Pinhas took an active hand in the progressive music scene in France, for example producing and distributing the music of Métal Urbain, a pioneering French post-punk outfit.  After a musical hiatus during the 1980s, Pinhas returned to action in the 90s, and in the last 20 years he has collaborated with Peter Frohmader, Pascal Comelade, Scanner, and Merzbow, among others.

Returning to his intellectual roots, in 2001 Pinhas published a book on music and philosophy entitled Les larmes de Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s Tears).  I haven’t read it, but it looks like a fascinating work, touching on such figures as Pierre Boulez, Henri Bergson, Robert Fripp, and—of course—Nietzsche himself and his on-again, off-again composer-idol, Richard Wagner.

September 13, 2010, 3:35pm

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Banco del Mutuo Soccorso: “Cento mani e cento occhi”

From the album Darwin! (1972)

In the dubious estimation of musical common sense, the 1970s are typically represented as years of sorrow, a vast artistic wasteland.  The unfortunately prominent developments of adult contemporary and disco helped stain this decade with the reputation of slick, soulless overproduction. But— aside from the fact that there is a time and place for Giorgio Moroder and yes, even Barry Manilow— beneath the surface, the 1970s is one of the most rich and varied periods in the entire century, spanning everything from the brilliant funk/soul fusion of Curtis Mayfield in the U.S. to the groundbreaking works of “acousmatic music” presented in France by composers such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani.

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the decade is the international diffusion of progressive rock, which had been launched by a handful of (mostly) British bands in the late 60s.  Prog rock, with its classical and jazz influences, its sophisticated song structures, and its expansion of the sonic palette beyond the tired, guitar-dominated sound of conventional rock, quickly spread across the European continent, and took on distinctive new forms far removed from its often cloying and affected Anglophone incarnations.

One of the most impressive products of this development was Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (roughly, “Bank of Mutual Aid”), an Italian prog-rock band founded by the brothers Vitorio and Gianni Nocenzi in Rome in 1969.  Their eponymous debut album was released in 1972.  Later that year, Banco recorded what is widely regarded as one of the defining works of the genre, a concept album inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and entitled simply Darwin!

“Cento mani e cento occhi” (“A hundred hands and a hundred eyes”) is to my ears the album’s highlight.  At just over five minutes long, the song is quite compact by prog-rock standards, but its modest length compresses a multi-sectional, developmental structure of compelling dynamism, from the pseudo-classical fanfare of the opening to the stripped-down, two-chord intensity of the outro— all of it held together by the powerful operatic vocals of singer Francesco Di Giacomo.

July 27, 2010, 1:34pm