Marchetti, Lionel

Knud un Nom de Serpent (Le Cercle des Entrailles)

Label: Intransitive Recordings Country: USA

"Lionel Marchetti's classic album of harrowing tape music from 1999, Knud un Nom de Serpent (Le Cercle des Entrailles), was published by Intransitive in 1999, quickly sold out, and remains the most requested title to be resurrected from our back catalog. We're thrilled to make Knud available again, now with a striking new cover design and an appreciative essay by Bhob Rainey (nmperign, The BSC).

The gripping drama of Knud un Nom de Serpent illustrates Marchetti's idea of popular music as Shamanic ritual, a gateway to ecstatic altered states. Armed with fierce wit and a razor blade, he smashes together sounds from all over the world into a hallucinatory cyclone of Jamaican reggae, French chanson, American avant-garde vocalists, Thai pop songs, nature recordings, spoken text, and more. The result is a chilling work of furious, obliquely narrative tape-collage and tense, frightening scenes. As Marchetti explained to The Wire magazine, "I've always been interested in the idea of the medicine man. Someone who by sheer force of imagination transports you into another world, part artist, part healer. Maybe that's what a composer is."

Lionel Marchetti (France, 1967) is a self-taught composer of musique concrÃ'te. He has built his own recording studio, and has composed in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris since 1993. Marchetti also performs improvised music with microphones and loudspeakers as a duo with Jérôme Noetinger, as part of the group quintetAvant, and with the collective Le Cube, which performs live music and interactive film. Marchetti's book La Musique Concrète De Michel Chion was published by Éditions Metamkine in 1998."-Intransitive