Customer Reviews

Messe Pour le Temps Present-Original

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

I would give it 5 stars, but some of it is a bit long in the tooth and repetative. Gotta love the experimental sounds of the sixties transfused in there. I heard this on WNYU's New Afternoon Show two years ago and promptly bought it. My coworkers like it and want to hear it while we work!!! I heard another remix of Psyche Rock at a club (The Cooler) in Manhattan the other night and now I have to find out who did that one!

Originally entitled "Les jerks électroniques de la Messe Pour Le Temps Présent
et musiques concrètes de Pierre Henry pour Maurice Béjart" (something like: "The Electronic Jerks of the Mass for The Present Time and Concrete Music by Pierre Henry for Maurice Béjart) contains a number of works that give the listener a great idea of how electronic music beginning to shape the larger sphere of music in the 1960s.
The first five tracks comprise Henry's ballet composed for Maurice Béjart (Mass for The Present Time) and are really my favorite bits off of the album. The tracks represent a successful blending of electronically created sounds with catchy beats and guitar rhythms from rock music. The first track "Prologue" sets the stage for the rest of the ballet, introducing traditional drums and guitars interspersed with electronic sounds that branch off of Pierre Henry's collaborations with Pierre Schaeffer in the world of musique concrete - Henry seems to use mostly electronic sounds versus recorded samples, which are the defining elements of Schaeffer and musique concrete. While I can't claim to be a "concrete" fan, if that's your bag, check out "Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul" which is a joint work by the Henry and Schaeffer that really exemplifies musique concrete. (For the curious, Béjart actually choreographed a dance for some of the "Symphonie..." as well, which you can see here: [..])

The second track, "Psyche Rock," has survived in popular music through the theme to the TV show "Futurama" and remixes by the likes of Fatboy Slim; it has definitely been stuck in my head since I bought the album. Henry uses really cool sounds and tertiary rhythms layered on top of the infectious beat. The track is a good mix of samples and electronic sounds that doesn't belabor the point of incorporating novel sounds. Though I wish that more of Béjart's ballet survived somewhere online, you can see a short bit here: [..]. A neat music video also exists for Psyche Rock. Though I don't know when it was created, it features a bunch of electronic components jiving to the song - it definitely makes an electrical engineer like me smile from ear to ear ([..]

The third track "Jericho Jerk" utilizes lots of spacey sounds jumping around the stereo field to create a groovy piece that reminds me of smooth criminals doing their thing on the silver screen (a la Ocean's Eleven).

The fourth track, "Teen Tonic," mixes elements of Jericho Jerk and Psyche Rock. Henry uses a nice palette of sampled and electronic sounds to create another cool track I like almost as much as Psyche Rock. It is both groovy and memorable with ample stereo effects on a smooth rhythm.

The last track of the ballet, "Too Fortiche," picks up the pace after teen tonic while using less electronic noises but a more complex bass line and guitar melody. It's a neat rock piece, though not my favorite blend with electronic music.

There are three more sections to the CD, but I don't find them to be terribly interesting aside from their experimental natures and academic relevance. "La Reine Verte" falls more on the side of pure electronic music, though it does feature some repeated samples. I would classify the two component tracks as "organized sound" according to Edgard Varèse that serve to push the bounds of music into new timbres and rhythms, atypical of popular music. Henry was also an admirer of Luigi Russolo who was instrumental (pun intended) in pushing the use of noise as a musical element; this idea is evident in the entirety of the album. The third section "Le Voyage" falls into the same category as Karlheinz Stockhausen who was another artist of the time that used both samples and electronic sounds to create music. The three pieces of this section remind me of Stockhausen's "Studie I" and "Studie II" which are more like ambient electronic music composed of dark/foreboding themes. The last 10 tracks (Variations pour une porte et un soupir") are largely in the musique concrete camp with a few electronic sounds thrown in. These pieces are more like "organized sound," but not as ambient as La Reine Verte.

Though I can't say I'm a fan of the last three quarters of the album, the tracks certainly represent novel ideas in music creation. At the very least, they are impressive works in an era before computers. Maybe if I drill that into my head while listening through the album a few more times I will come to a better appreciation of these tracks. Pierre Henry is known for being a pioneer, and this album certainly proves it. While the first five tracks are the only tracks I can see myself listening to for pleasure, electronic music buffs should find the remainder pretty interesting and possibly sample worthy.