The Italian label continues its valuable new series of archival releases with this 1998 collaboration between two of France's most active contemporary concret-ists and the old-guard explorer to whom they are most indebted. Chion's sprawling tape collages are the obvious precedents for much of Marchetti's and Noetinger's solo work, and his influence is certainly felt on this live performance from the Festival Musique Action, an event that catches the younger musicians still very taken with their elder's drifting compositional technique.Fringes Archive
While there are some of the more "extreme" tape and analog manipulations that would later populate Noetinger and Marchetti's duo projects, the real pleasures of Les 120 Jours rise from the dark surrealism of the music's more specific and referential sound sources. The trio had spent over a year prior to the performance gathering banks of sound, and they arrive well enough equipped to create a diverse and shadowy world with epic sweep and weight almost entirely unrelated to any sonic density or visceral quality in the sounds used.
Opening, like some of Chion's solo works, with a spoken concert hall-style introduction of players and title, Les 120 Jours plays off theatrical tropes throughout but in subtle ways, interjecting at parts rather than framing the whole and putting limits on the piece. Fragments of French war films line up next to clipped opera vocals, barking dogs, strangled snoring, and aroused moans, everything laced together at the slow, contemplative pace that remains among Chion's unrivaled skills. Untraceable mechanical wheezing enters in twisted dialogue with labored breathing and painfully human choking sounds, sculpting an atmosphere that floats whimsically between inner and outer spheres of experience. The musicians confuse not only performed music with prerecorded, autonomous sound but also sampled or "commodified" music with sound captured and contextualized in the field. Pieces of Cypress Hill sneak by along with snatches of roadside ambience, faraway house music from the insides of cars and a mosaic of city sounds, automated machine beeps, engine turnovers, and a thousand French conversations. Knowing the language would, I am sure, increase the surrealist bent of these two discs dramatically; for the non-French speaker it is impossible to recognize what must be some incredibly odd speech juxtapositions. The massive piece works like a slow nighttime journey, a wounded stagger through the dim city center or an unshakeable fever dream.
Though the pop culture references and endless stream of media dialogue become stepping-stones through the confused passage, they are more a curse than a blessing, arriving as deadpanned, empty referents, often repeated as if to hint, mockingly, at some cryptic significance. One particularly unnerving segment features a ghostly robot voice in steady whisper: "Don't be afraid, I am not a machine; I am just an image..." Imagine such a voice traveling on, the only discernable communication amidst a chorus of shrouded street noise along some windswept corridor, an alley's dark hallway where a single bell tolls as opera crystallizes in the blue night above. These are just minutes of Les 120 Jours' heady sprawl. It's hard to tell if the piece's title was meant to reference De Sade's book or Pasolini's film, but the music itself makes ample case for comparison, a creeping, disorienting montage, beautiful but at a cost.
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