LEWES: Con Club

Sunday 16th October, 2022

7:30pm

Event information

Mixing free jazz, post punk, high life, brass band, symphonic elements and kraut rock, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp make a transcendental, almost ritualistic music, coupled with powerful lyrics declaimed in rage against a world that is falling apart.

Whether in prestigious festivals such as Womad, Paléo Festival de Nyon, Fusion Festival, Incubate and Jazz à la Vilette, or on the four albums released since they began, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp show an incredible fluidity. The group embraces the forms of its musicians while pushing them to their limits. The result is a powerful, experimental, unstable and terribly alive, organic sound.

Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp - the name is an homage to traditional African groups - Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono n°1, Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrytmo etc.- was founded in 2006 by Vincent Bertholet. It is a large-scale project designed as a real orchestra, and the size of the ensemble has varied over time. Now with 12 members, 14 in the past or 6 at the beginning, the ensemble has travelled the stages of Europe to demonstrate that the formula "the more the merrier" has never been more true than on stage.

They are touring with their 5th album We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway. Built around twelve musicians it develops a repetitive musicality which, deployed in successive waves, creates a feeling of trance.

With support from ChopChop

"CHOPCHOP’s music snakes round its orator like a slippery thing, cymbals replaced by the clatter of hubcaps on toms, cutlery-jammed guitars – there’s an itchy jazzy vibe to the melodics, fuelled by a fertile imagination full of bruised shapes and punkish angles.

Performance artist Xelís de Toro dances the jagged edges superbly in an urgent, jerky Giacometti centrepiece that has a David Byrne-like drive to his contortions, enraptured in a stream of consciousness simplicity and a razor-sharp intellect. The sounds that surround him are tensive, built up on darting dynamics, eerie keys and smeared trumpet that Schaumburg your head with surprise. A mosaic whole, crawling and crackling, mining mantra-like to vocal abstracts that punch out their confines.” FREQ magazine