Lionel Marchetti offers a two-hour musique concrète performance, layering nature recordings, spoken text, pop songs and ethnic music drawn from his 20-year body of work, spatialized through eight loudspeakers distributed around the room.

Here the French artist divides his presentation into themed-halves—”the natural world” and “shamanism”—each with its own direction. The latter is one of Marchetti’s favorites. He sees parallels between the medicine man and composer, both as someone who transports you into another world.

Lionel Marchetti (b.1967, Marseille, France) is an electroacoustic improviser and musique concrète composer. Initially self-taught, Marchetti studied with Xavier Garcia in Grenoble. A scholar, he later worked at the CFMI (Lyon) and INA-GRM studios (Paris), and published a book on composer Michel Chion. In the mid-1990s Marchetti was one of a handful of artists who took electroacoustic music out of the academic studio and into the realm of free improv, using a live set-up with microphones, small speakers, tape recorders and radio. As an improviser he performs in his long-standing duo with Jérôme Noetinger, in the audio-visual project Le Cube, with influential collective Archipel, and with dancer Yoko Higashi. In his studio work he incorporates sound collage and electroacoustic composition, although 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.

Lionel Marchetti made his U.S. debut at Lampo in June 2002, in a duo performance with Jérôme Noetinger.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation