Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp + CHOPCHOP

About

Traversing genres and concepts, from post punk to highlife, kraut rock to free jazz, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, the 12 piece band from Geneva, return to Lewes Con Club in December with their hair-raising and beautifully eccentric music.

Transcendental, at times ritualistic, the music contains a powerful narrative, rallying around micro and macro confusions and brought to life with an eruption of sounds and sensations, from boompty trombone riffs and gleaming string arrangements to bottles breaking, eerie metallic weird-outs and poly-rhythmic pulses and notes. The overall effect is that of a tense often Kronos-esque cinematic cut-and-pasted trip to the sun.

Founded in Geneva 2006 by Vincent Bertholet, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp (a mischievous title in homage to traditional African groups – Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono n°1, Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrythmo etc. and influential French artist Marcel Duchamp) is a large-scale, ever evolving project.

The band has graced the stages of Europe, from Fusion Festival to Incubate, Womad to Bad Bonn Kilbi, effortlessly proving that the formula “the more the merrier” has never been more true than on stage.

With support from ChopChop

“CHOPCHOP’s music snakes round its orator like a slippery thing, cymbals replaced by the clatter of hubcaps on toms, cutlery-jammed guitars – there’s an itchy jazzy vibe to the melodics, fuelled by a fertile imagination full of bruised shapes and punkish angles.

Performance artist Xelís de Toro dances the jagged edges superbly in an urgent, jerky Giacometti centrepiece that has a David Byrne-like drive to his contortions, enraptured in a stream of consciousness simplicity and a razor-sharp intellect. The sounds that surround him are tensive, built up on darting dynamics, eerie keys and smeared trumpet that Schaumburg your head with surprise. A mosaic whole, crawling and crackling, mining mantra-like to vocal abstracts that punch out their confines.”

FREQ magazine

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