This Sunday I’ve been with my girlfriend to the National Museum of Contemporary Art to enjoy the last day of Rokolectiv. Electro digital board, nintendo meets electro and so on. All the bands (Reactable - Es/live & presentation , Pierre Bastien - Fr/live, Minus & Vali Chincisan - ro/live & Vj Set, Freeform - U.K./live, Doravideo - Jp/live) were good, but besides Pierre Bastien nothing really impressed me. So I’ll be talking about him and his Mechanical Orchestra. His music, in terms of genre, can be classed as noise, but the term doesn’t really encompass all there is. Firstly, the Mechanical Orchestra is a small wonder in its own terms: an ingenious microphone setup and a device no bigger than half a table, with replaceable parts and different sound making setups. Secondly, Pierre uses other instruments to augment and enrich the orchestra (one particularly impressive moment was when he sung at a trumpet that had a small pipe that led to a glass of wine - the sounds exited under-water, so to speak). And last but not least, the final product, the music, is so much more, emotionally and intellectually speaking, than many other noise bands. So, in conclusion, it’s noise at the essence, but with a heart (even if it’s a mechanical one). Here’s what Pierre Bastien’s site says:
“Pierre Bastien (born Paris, 1953) post-graduated in eighteenth-century French literature at University Paris-Sorbonne. In 1977 he built his first musical machinery. For the next ten years he has been composing for dance companies and playing with Pascal Comelade. In the meantime he was constantly developing his mechanical orchestra. Since 1987 he concentrates on it through solo performances, sound installations, recordings and collaborations with such artists as Pierrick Sorin, Karel Doing, Jean Weinfeld, Robert Wyatt or Issey Miyake.”
And here’s what I say. Go see him live if you get the chance. Buy or rent his records. Worship the mechanical orchestra. (Well, besides the last part, you should pretty much do all the other stuff).
