Important: CTM-Festival-Tickets and Accreditations are not valid for this concert.
 
When Pierre Henry, Musique Concréte pioneer in the early 50s at the studios of Pierre Schaeffer, sat down with Spooky Tooth to make a record in the late 60s, the project was met with disbelief and skepticism. Spooky Tooth was one of the heavier progressive rock acts of the day, with Gary Wright and Mike Harrison's dual keyboards set against the guitar wails of Luther Grosvenor. The tracks for Ceremony, written by Henry and Wright, are organized around the English text of the Catholic liturgy, with results that were both macabre and psychedelic.
 
But Pierre Henry had never been one to stick to formulas. Ceremony was recorded right at the peak of Henry’s crossover success with Psych Rock – the song later re-immortalized in remixes by Fat Boy Slim, Coldcut, Dimitri from Paris and others – but Henry had already been producing radically un-academic work for years. After an initial close relationship with the "official teachings" of Musique Concréte, Henry chose his own path. Even in the infancy of Musique Concréte, he was already stirring things up, reinventing and reinterpreting the accepted methods: as early as the 1953 compositions Le Voile d’Orphée, he had developed timbrally rich, profoundly characteristic voices with complex structures that followed no rules, but obeyed a personal, internal logic unique to the composer.
 
The name Pierre Henry is undeniably fixed to Musique Concréte and its founder, Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s early work manipulating recorded sound, a revolt against German atonal contemporary music, certainly opened a new field of exploration, but Schaeffer was an engineer, and his most successful works were undertaken in collaboration with Henry, the classically trained musician who, with enormous talent and ingenuity went on to continually explore, create and expand on the Musique Concrete fundamentals in unexpected ways. His path, touching as it has on many fields including dance and theatre – including the well-known collaborations with the late Maurice Béjart, is structured by an idiosyncratic force that, like his compositions, tends not to reveal itself until fully realized.
 
For this very special club transmediale event, Pierre Henry will present the piece, Dracula (2003), and a new work, Pulsations (2007), adapted specifically for the Volksbühne theatre for its German premiere. The performance of the piece will be a unique, site-specific event with Henry, in the centre of the theatre, controlling 26 channels of pre-recorded sound to create an electro-acoustic improvisation on a grand scale, its evolution subtly dictated by the quirks and character of the theatre itself.
 
Audio Engineer: Etienne Bultingaire