Messe Pour le Temps Present-Original [Import]

Pierre Henry (Composer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Composer: Pierre Henry
• Audio CD (July 15, 1999)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Philips Import
• ASIN: B0000243C3
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,529 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

This is the much admired, somewhat groovy and extremely experimental Messe Pour Le Temps Present from french composer Pierre Henry - one of the pioneers of the music concrete movement. Recorded in 1967, Messe Pour Le Temps Present was originally scored for a Maurice Bejart ballet, Henry being an ardent admirer of the french choreographers work. Messe Pour Le Temps Present was one of a handful of collaborations with Bejart and Pierre Henry even travelled the world as sound engineer with Bejart's group. The first five tracks of this CD are really nice and groovy (with some cool electronics thrown in!) and the rest, as you can expect from one of the original exponents of music concrete, is very experimental. Philips. 2005.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sixties electro in a new jacket, April 12, 2001

By 

J. Verbunt "ijanman" (Tilburg, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Messe Pour le Temps Present-Original (Audio CD)

In the sixties Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier composed "Messe pour le temps present" as a ballet for Maurice Brejart. More than thirty years later some of the modern electro-artists rediscovered this masterpiece. William Orbit, St Germain, Tek 9, Dimitri from Paris, Coldcut and a lot of others did their own thing with this controversial piece of art. Electronic psychedelia transformed to a modern age, but the original also still is worth listening to. Trance, drum 'n bass, techno all are styles which have arisen the last decade. But if you listen to Pierre Henry's musique concrete you will know that really there is nothing new under the sun. Some of the remixes stay very close to the original versions, some are completely different. In a whole this is a fantastic CD for modern people to discover the roots of electronic music. This is where Kraftwerk have found their thing.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic, January 3, 2010

By 

Bill Your 'Free Form FM Handi Cyber Print DJ ... (Mahwah, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Messe Pour le Temps Present-Original (Audio CD)

Sometimes getting into early electronic music can be a little offputting, if you're going via Cage or Stockhausen.


It is great music, but can be a little accidemic: "Here I chose to work with the frequencies of five ossolators using non-circular structures on five HH Scott Speakers, a Heathkit mono ampifier, and five syncronized General Electric Tape Decks. This will be a peice of 64% atonal elements, 15% tonic interval dissonenece, and 21% 12-tone rubricks.

Ok, sounds groovy. I'll get my honey, and we'll dance. Seriously, though. It can be more about testing the behavior of sound than a listening experiance.

Henry (on-ree) is not like this. His 1960s work is electronic, but throws sound collages of rock, martching music, avant-gaurd, really anything Henry wants into the stew.

There are some extremely creepy and gripping passages here, and the music can be chaotic--altough here, that is welcome. You get the sense hearing this that Henry was more interested in creating a psychadelic trip for the listener than studying wave forms on an occiliscope.

This also fantastic early use of stereo seperation, which is the same sound moving between two speakers, or, even better, darting through your headphoned head. If you want to know what progressions were made in recording in the 1960s, this is a great album to hear

And I'll bet I know who did hear this: Spooky Tooth, who enlisted Henre to make Ceremony.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superbly outworldy, March 23, 2008

By 

Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say" (OLLIERGUES France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Messe Pour le Temps Present-Original (Audio CD)

This mass is a real miracle. Pierre Henry uses all music and noise available to create a pulsing heart of harmony, the heart of the Lord, Jesus' heart pulsing on his cross one beat at the time towards complete death and one step at a time down towards the grave. This harassing and in many ways harrowing experience leads us to extraterrestrial three-dimensional sounds that cross the space of our brain between our two ears with the precision and plowing effect of a golden hoe that breaks the dry crust of the earth to let the deep fumes of decaying compost come out and fly up to the sun. What is strange in the "Jericho Jerk" is that the basic noise he uses transmutes a recording of some popular rock piece of the time by unraveling it and crisscrossing it with these worms from out-space we have already spoken of. This is tonic for sure, but somewhere becomes "teen tonic" in the repetitivity of teenagers suffering from early Parkinson's disease. But it breaks and we move on, Parkinson-like, to the next Tourette syndrome, slightly metallic indeed, beating syncopatingly to some drilling sounds and cosmic pulses and we must say it is not that too "fortiche" though it is quite "fortiche" enough. What could Bejart have done on that music, with that music, to that music that wraps us up with in the far distance some jazzy trumpet. What a mass indeed! What does it consecrate? What holy body does it raise to our worshipping? No answer of course without the ballet. What must be a Green Queen, a female voice singing some shrill vocalic sound on top of the surf of the music that does not accept length as an argument and cuts short any attempt at lasting more than an evanescent moment. And that shrill voice comes back over and over parading on the boulevard of our still conscious minds. Strangely enough it seems the young man who is marching through the Green Queen's kingdom is confronted to successive waves of insects that all try to destabilize him and reduce him to a non-entity. Some mosquito-copters even cross several times the sky looking for the dripping life source of some blood to drink. And that Green Queen ends her appearance with an electronic rock that is a soft version of some larsening pulsing bubbles exploding at the surface of our hearing. Farewell Green Queen, let's continue our voyage. We are on a two-beat train that lurks and lunges at the frontier of nowhere trying to get into that non-existing wasteland. But the deeper we get into it the thicker it seems to become the more it seems to be sticking to our living breathing organs. That train means death in nowhere beyond anywhere. So we have to get off and dive into the water of this inter-cosmic space that is absolute fluidity and irretrievable mobility. And yet we have the impression nothing moves, nothing changes. And that becomes a menace against our humdrum daily peace. And that's what Pierre Henry seems to mean. When noise turns music, when sounds turn rhythm, when sonorous particles turn harmony we lose the feeling of the ground, we start floating in-between two lands that retain the characteristic of being unreachable, and there it is, this bubbling, blabbering, lip-twisting sound behind it all which sounds like the swallowing mouth of some cosmic ugly monster come on earth to taste its main products, and first of all human flesh, or shouldn't I say meat. And we discover on that wasteland deep in our skulls the peaceful gods that have been living in the distance. And they are floating nonchalantly in their wasteland with no ambition, no need, no desire. A presence on your skin you feel more than you see, you hear more than you anything else. And you may change your glasses' filters or your hearing aid's strainer, they will be the same, more or less high on the scale and associating in a conflictive pair, the roaming ones and the sighing others, the close at hand and the more distant. Those gods are the dancers on the stage that come out of the darkness and return back into it in a to and fro movement of light steps in the light. Then the variations on a door and a sigh are funny in their associating such a material noise, the creaking door, and such a physical if not physiological sound, the shrill sigh of a non existing virtual extra-terrestrial alien beyond the door whose creaking is like a communication line with nowhere anywhere in the vast universe.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines