PARIS — Pierre Henry, aged father of electronic music, lives in a small house that also serves as his studio, in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris. I recently went there with a small group of people to hear one of his magnificent musique concrète concerts that he performs live from his studio mixing board. It was an incredible and rare experience, similar in audio effect to his Intérieur/extérieur CD that contains the concert series Pierre Henry chez lui (“Pierre Henry at his place”) organized by the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1996.
Speakers had been intricately placed throughout the different floors of the small house, and we took up seated positions among them so as to better get immersive satisfaction from this master’s mind-blowing art music. Comfortably seated, my eyes could not but help but wander over the walls, many of which were covered in Henry’s artworks, rather complexassemblages of existing objects and images. The art on the walls matched the structural conditions of his music perfectly, as it too is an art that is assembled from recorded sounds and noises, woven together into a (somewhat) coherent flowing whole. This is an art of sound montage and mixing. A lot of mixing: take for example Henry’s “La dixième symphonie de Beethoven” (1979–1988), where he mixes together some extracts from nine symphonies of the German composer.
Read on (with wild illustrations!) at HERE
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