Pierre Henry: The Avant-Garde Composer Who Formed Rock’s Future

A phrase to the sensible: do you have to ever be requested, in the midst of your subsequent pub quiz, which younger revolutionary was chargeable for proclaiming, “It is necessary to destroy music,” your thoughts may reflexively scroll by means of a Rolodex of iconoclasts and provocateurs together with the likes of John Lydon, Frank Zappa, Thurston Moore, Conrad Schnitzler, and Brian Eno. Credible guesses all; however these phrases had been in reality expressed by Pierre Henry, a trailblazer within the sound-sourcing and -manipulating ideas of musique concrète, in a brief, pugnacious essay entitled For Considering About New Music, which the composer, who was born on December 9, 1927, wrote in 1947, when he was simply 20.

“Today, music can have only one [meaning] in relation to cries, laughter, sex, death,” Henry continued. “I believe that the [tape] recorder is currently the best instrument for the composer who really wants to create by ear for the ear.”

Pierre Henry, who died on July 4, 2017, aged 89, has lengthy been acknowledged as a key determine in the event of electroacoustic and digital music. Right here was a galvanic and liberating presence whose tireless experimentation, immersed all through in an unbounded world of sonic potentialities, manifested itself as a lifetime’s value of difficult, fearless and redemptive works. His storied profession is definitively saluted with Polyphonies, a 12CD compilation curated and remastered by the composer himself, and together with 9 beforehand unreleased items.

Hearken to Polyphonies on Apple Music and Spotify.

Whereas Henry’s status is unassailable amongst aficionados of experimental music, many rock and pop followers are likely to know little or nothing concerning the man. Some might concentrate on his controversial 1969 collaboration with Spooky Tooth, on the album Ceremony (included herein), whereas others may admire the titanic shadow his “Psyché Rock” 7” (1967, with Michel Colombier) casts over the theme from Futurama; however this assortment ought to assist to broaden the notion of Pierre Henry as a found-sound avatar whose inquisitive facility with tape recorders, mixing desks and repurposed instrumentation pre-empted whole swathes of psychedelia, electro, and remix tradition.

Apparently, with occasional digressions that see adjoining newer and older items complement or distinction with one another, the chronology typically runs in reverse throughout Polyphonies’ 12 CDs. Subsequently, the set successfully begins with Henry’s 2016 work, Chroniques Terriennes, and concludes with formative outings from 1950 – Musique Sans Titre, Concerto Des Ambiguïtés and Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul, the latter assembled with fellow musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer. The impact is to double-underline one’s respect for Pierre Henry: because the items recede by means of the many years, the composer’s boldly singular imaginative and prescient turns into increasingly more admirable.

That stated, the beforehand unreleased Chronique Terriennes makes for an absorbing entry level – 12 sequences described by the composer as “… day by day chronicles of encounters with the instrument, nature and the essence of music.” Tranquil and discreetly sinister by turns, this outstanding soundscape achieves a peculiar inside logic by juxtaposing the spacious reverb of ships’ horns carried throughout a big physique of water; birdsong; a brief burst of sprechgesang; a creaking door; and the chirping of crickets which progressively turns into dense and oppressive. In its textural rummaging and scurrying, it’s the audio equal of Jan Švankmajer’s unsettling stop-frame animations.

For a compilation that celebrates a physique of ostensibly summary work, Polyphonies comprises some surprisingly illustrative interludes. The implicit narrative arc of Une Tour De Babel (1998), as an illustration, appropriately maps out awe, hubris and, in the end, confusion, whereas the earlier 12 months’s Une Histoire Naturelle Ou Les Roues De La Terre combines the basic with the mechanistic to depict man’s injuriously cavalier relationship with the animals and ecosystems of a “globe in perdition.”

Some items, however, could be appreciated on a extra primary stage, ought to listeners want to park their mind for a spell. The twittering, peeping electronics and vertiginous sine waves of 1973’s Kyldex – unissued excerpts from a three-and-a-half-hour “cybernetic opera” – are manna for lovers of early polyphonic synths; or, certainly, anybody for whom the Clangers moonscape exerts a powerfully nostalgic gravity of its personal.

Equally, curious learners coming at Polyphonies from a rock or pop background are directed in direction of Rock Électronique – obliquely echoed quasar pulses from 1963, the 12 months of Merseybeat within the UK – and, after all, Ceremony, Henry’s 1969 “electronic mass” in collaboration with Spooky Tooth. The latter experiment bewildered and alienated the majority of the band’s fanbase on the time, nevertheless it now sounds fairly not like the rest tried by any group at any level in historical past. Perversely – brilliantly – the band’s blues-rock music beds are ducked within the combine means beneath Henry’s bilious, shifting overlay of storm-tossed electronics. “Credo” represents the road within the sand, with Henry contributing a looped, nonsensical, cut-up vocal that comes on the listener as relentlessly as wasps at a picnic web site. Say what you’ll, nevertheless it takes genius to interpret rock music in such a wilfully opaque method.

The true kicker is that works reminiscent of Voile d’Orphée, Spatiodynamisme, Astrologie (all courting from 1953) and 1950’s Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul nonetheless retain their energy to shock, confound and delight. These arresting sonic creations are destined to stay unmoored from time: completely inspirational, barrier-breaching items that, regardless of the rigorous scholastics that went into their building, appear to reaffirm the message that the shackles are off, and every little thing is feasible.

Polyphonies could be purchased right here.