“It’s a sculpture, it’s a picture, it’s an accompanist, it’s a poet, it’s decoration—this machine is a situation.” So Swiss artist Jean Tinguely described one of his large kinetic sculptures, art pieces that recycled metal scraps and mounted them in chunks of wood, cement blocks, or oil barrels. When triggered, these motorized sculptures shivered to life in art galleries, making a clamor not unlike musique concrète, the post-war sound conceived by French composer Pierre Schaeffer in a studio that during the war served as a center for the Resistance movement in French radio. It was a sound as malleable as Tinguely’s descriptor and none of the composers responsible for such music pushed the definition more than Luc Ferrari.
Ferrari encountered the likes of Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage in the early ’50s before joining Schaeffer at the newly established Groupe de Recherches Musicales near the end of that decade. Musique concrète could manipulate recorded sound, the human voice, musical instruments, or synthesizers, but while Schaeffer and his fellow composers favored a more academic approach, Ferrari’s music was impish. His most famous piece of musique concrète, 1970’s Presque Rien, replicated dawn in a Yugoslavian fishing village, which Matmos’ Drew Daniel once described as “a letting go of the standard purposes of musical sound…in favor of a quietly focused experience of listening to the sounds of the world on their own terms.” But he also did fidgety orchestral minimalism and a Sapphic encounter set to African drums and his own whispers.
Tinguely 1967 reveals two previously unreleased soundtracks from the first decade of Ferrari’s output, including one rendered from recordings made of Tinguely’s epileptic sculptures to soundtrack a 1966 television piece on the artist. “Tinguely” clangs to life, sussing out a rhythm from a sound like a screen door slamming against a bird cage over and over again. What scans as just an unorganized din, slowly reveals a peculiar sensibility making sense of it all. There are staccato outbursts of typewriters, looped voices, whirring motors, metallic scrapes like picking at a lock, and what might be a tuba burbling. At one point, Ferrari combines some of them in such a way so as to suggest strolling through Tinguely’s workshop, though a blast of heavy alien reverb reveals it to be a sonic construct.
“Dernier Matin d'Edgar-Allan Poe” dates from three years prior, a piece for a short 33mm black-and-white film. It’s the subtler of the two and rather than Ferrari’s telltale slyness with musique concrète, it sounds more like a free improv trio: a bow scratches against strings, a drumstick moves across a cymbal, a chord organ lurches. It grows even quieter to include the small sounds of a creaking chair and what might be the man himself humming into a kazoo. Both pieces reveal different iterations of Ferrari, but they aren’t the best entry points into the man’s peculiar sound-world.