Name: Lionel Marchetti
Occupation: Composer, sound artist
Nationality: French
Recent release: Lionel Marchetti teams up with Australian chamber ensemble Decibel for Inland Lake (Le lac intérieur), out now via Room40.

Over the course of his career, Lionel Marchetti has worked with a wide range of artists, including Jérôme Noetinger, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Cat Hope, and Vanessa Rossetto.

[Read our Jean-Luc Guionnet interview]
[Read our Cat Hope interview]
[Read our Vanessa Rossetto interview]
[Read our Jérôme Noetinger interview about the Revox B77]



Can you talk a bit about your interest in / or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it? And: From the point of view of your creative process, how do you work with sounds?

I discovered music concrète by chance as a teenager, still in high school, at the age of 17, on the radio, during the broadcast of an extraordinary acousmatic concert live on France Musique. My artistic sensitivity, already there since childhood, was more or less well expressed at that time through drawing, painting, andsculpting. At this moment, however, it found — in a flash — all the substance necessary for truly realising it (which I did not not suspect yet, of course).

Bernard Parmegiani and Christian Zanési were broadcast that evening; then I would get to know gradually, via a few records, Xavier Garcia, the first concerts in Lyon where I now study: François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani, Francis Dhomont, Michel Chion, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bernard Fort, Jacques Lejeune then quickly Xanis Xennakis, Pierre Henry, Michèle Bokanovski, Éliane Radigue (the full list would be very long...) but also the records of Einstürzende Neubauten, The Legendary Pink Dots, Captain Beefheart or This Heat!

About a composition entitled The Fire, co-written with my partner Yôko Higashi, in 2005, which is associated with the triptych Red Dust, I wrote this brief poem:

"An arrow
near the neck — — the fire. »

Every day is a new day. Here is therefore a work about oneself, slow, gradual and necessary, which concerns my gaze as well as my relationship to the world - which seems to me, today, to be the true goal of my artistic journey to come.

Why would I talk about a fire while wanting to answer the question of a first step, a first experience?

As a child, the world looked at me as much as I looked at the world. What is this simple and natural movement that breathes within things? — A dawn, a beginning, the morning fire which from the horizon, always moving, always changing, makes the beauty of the world itself incandescent.

Beauty and incandescence. Yes, a fascination for the beauty of the world; not without being lucid about its other side. Much darker. There is a cruelty that cannot be denied. Cruelty, however, in the sense of the Theater of Cruelty, to be appreciated — following Antonin Artaud of course — as a possible face-to-face relationship: at the moment of a certain type of understanding (without words?) when this which, of the world, offers itself in its complexities but fortunately remains unanswered.

Why follow in the footsteps of the worldly, of those who only build to supress and profit?

Artistic and poetic practice, on the contrary, is an offering. And the artist, at the dawn of his practice — his practice is in my view at every moment a dawn, a beginning: in the sense that nothing exhausts him — thus walks hand in hand with a number of companions who, like him, have confidence in what is there, in what is born. And these companions are musicians; or poets.

Here is a poem by Georges Oppen, which I have in mind:

“Blades of grass touch and touch
in their small distances the poem begins”

An arrow, near the neck. To be aware of being alive, and to say so. Seize and fully breathe this chance, for all, for all; and say it. When one is in tune with oneself, when one is beyond the mundane, when one does not care, precisely, to position oneself in reaction, when it is not a question of being original but to be, quite simply — that is to say to be fulfilled; this is a journey that will take a lifetime.

What concerns our foundation is then revealed in its plenitude, its autonomy, its originality in the full sense of the word; in the same way as any living being on this planet, any natural thing has its originality, its singularity and signs, without why or how, of its presence - the simple fact of being there.

Be there and take advantage of that confidence — rather than trying to position yourself here and there and thereby be trapped in the artificial. It is a very difficult path, of course!

How would you describe the shift of moving towards music which places the focus foremost on sound, both from your perspective as a listener and a creator?

I listen and my breath is suspended. Something of this world which surrounds me seems to change texture, something is unhooked from the painting of my usual sensibility. Is it emotion that touches me with something other than language?

I listen, I breathe, I understand. Time, relative to my attention, suddenly changes direction. A bifurcation. For a strange path that certainly leads nowhere. And this nowhere is a question that must remain open to all questions.

As a composer of concrete music, perpetually in the process of inventing, shaping my own sounds, to arrange them a bit like a painter makes his own colors, I too am a listener. The first listener; just like every listener is a first listener.

But I will keep, for my composition, of my invented sounds, only those which with each listening will have a real power of sensual metamorphosis and will offer, to any listener, the freshness of such a moment of openings.

Offering a space for this availability of attention is a good starting point. And there should be no plans other than being there — I am hoping for such a direct encounter.

I listen; images are formed, calls seem to spring from the recorded material. These are the calls that guide my writing and that create, from scratch, the journey. It is these phenomena that require me to act and take the lead, until I move forward in an exploration of forms. Not to domesticate them, not to muzzle them — rather to provide them with a constructed space from which, assembled in a strange fiction, they will generate a new breath of their own, in those who listen.