Traversing genres and concepts, from post punk to highlife, kraut rock to free jazz, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, a Swiss 12 piece, return with their hair-raising and beautifully eccentric fifth LP We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway and unleash the dark, but ultimately uplifting first single Beginning
Transcendental, at times ritualistic, the music contains a powerful narrative, rallying around micro and macro confusions and brought to life with an eruption of sounds and sensations, from boompty trombone riffs and gleaming string arrangements to bottles breaking, eerie metallic weird-outs and poly-rhythmic pulses and notes. The overall effect is that of a tense often Kronos-esque cinematic cut-and-pasted trip to the sun.
Founded in Geneva 2006 by Vincent Bertholet, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp (a mischievous title in homage to traditional African groups – Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono n°1, Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrythmo etc. and influential French artist Marcel Duchamp) is a large-scale, ever evolving project. Originally starting out with 6 members, the group at one point reached 14 members (including 5 British members) before dropping back down to the 12 musicians present on this album. Ever since their inception, the band has graced the stages of Europe, from Fusion Festival to Incubate, Womad to Bad Bonn Kilbi, effortlessly proving that the formula “the more the merrier” has never been more true than on stage.
We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway, the group’s first album since 2018’s Sauvage Formes mixes free jazz, post punk, high life, brass band, symphonic mixtures and kraut rock. Their songs continuously show disregard for genre and traditional song structures. Lead single Beginning kicks things off with a dark & minimalist groove, continuously building, leading the listener on a journey through to the climatic, uplifting ending. Written while the world had all but come to a halt last year, vocalist Jo Burke recalls,
When I wrote the words I was thinking about an e-mail sent by Vincent [Bertholet] about the band travelling by train and not flying anymore and how most of us say we care for the environment but try to justify why we ‘need’ to fly or use a car or eat meat etc. I was also thinking a lot about how we can be quite arrogant in the way that we think we can control nature and use it for our own selfish purposes even though we are part of it. Also, how indifferent it is to us, when lock down was announced and all the news was about disease and death, everything around me was coming alive.
Second single So Many Things (I feel guilty about) mixes a gritty 90’s post punk sketch with an eccentric and bouncy rhythm featuring English vocalist Aby Vulliamy, who reels off a list of personal anxieties brought about by ongoing conscience battles about what we should and shouldn’t be doing to the environment, our bodies and the people around us. It aims to land somewhere between Phil Cohran and The Ex, but ends up sounding like neither one or the other, and ultimately, and uniquely, sounding like Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp.
Once again, on We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway. Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, led by the irrepressible Vincent Bertholet, prove that by refusing to stand still, by refusing to stick to genre, that, both live and in the studio, they are continuously a force to be reckoned with.