PIERRE HENRY – Maléfices

Beschreibung

Often evading the composer’s official discography lists Cacophonic present this outstanding, commonly undetected Pierre Henry film score providing fans of early electronics, femme vocal manipulation and hor- ror soundtracks with an indespensable „dream record“ that ticks every box and crosses out every line in the rule book.
Widely recognised as one of the original sonic architects of the move- ment known as musique concrete, having joined Pierre Schaeffer’s for- ward-thinking initiative as early as 1949, Pierre Henry was arguably the first musician to entertain the notion of this defiant musical revolution coexisting with traditional and poplular music. Initially using the medi- ums of modern dance and spoken word as a platform to contextualise his tape-music mutations (notably in unison with Maurice Bejart) Henry’s foresight to fuse accademic with thematic ideas lead to the birth of electronic sound design for film and theatre, expemplified most prevalently in the macabre.
The missing link between his earliest avant garde recordings and his later celebrated pop experiments with Michel Colombier and Spooky Tooth and rivaling the likes of Daphne Oram’s uncreditted SFX work for The Innocents this rare score to the 1962 Juliette Gréco vehicle Maléfices (aka The Hex or Where The Truth Lies) hears Henry at what is perhaps his most melodic, fragile and enchanting (especially for this unforgiving sheen-free formative era). Layering vocal tape loops and gossamer feminine voice treatments with plucked strings, white noise wind and brooding industrial treated piano textures Henry provides a series of conceptual poison peons to magnify this films intoxicated hal- luciogenic narrative.
This concise set of complete set themes is presented here fully remas- tered for the first time alongide rare excerpts from two of the compos- er’s very earliest and least obtainable forays into theatrical sound design with instrumental parts of Henry’s first stereo reconstruction of Bejart’s Orphee from 1961 and his seldom heard concrete interludes from Darius Milhaud and Max Gérard’s Mariage De La Feuille Et Du Cliché from 1958, both of which command rapidly increasing ransom fees amongst serious electronic music collectors.