Michel Chion
Michel Chion born in 1947 in Creil, France, is a composer of experimental music. He teaches at several institutions within France and currently holds the post as Associate Professor at the Université de Paris where he is a theoretician and teacher of audio-visual relationships. After studying literature and music he began to work for the ORTF (French Radio and Television Organisation) Service de La recherche as assistant to Pierre Schaeffer in 1970. He was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) between 1971 - 1976. His compositional pieces elaborate on schaeffarian theories and methodologies which Schaeffer referred to as musique concrète.
Michel Chion born in 1947 in Creil, France, is a composer of experimental music. He teaches at several institutions within France and currently holds the post as Associate Professor at the Université de Paris where he is a theoretician and teacher of audio-visual relationships. After studying literature and music he began to work for the ORTF (French Radio and Television Organisation) Service de La recherche as assistant to Pierre Schaeffer in 1970. He was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) between 1971 - 1976. His compositional pieces elaborate on schaeffarian theories and methodologies which Schaeffer referred to as musique concrète.
Portraits Polychromes n° 8 Michel Chion (Book)
2024 Stock*. A French-only book about Michel Chion with texts by Pierre-Albert Castanet, Martin Kaltenecker, Evelyne Gayou, Lionel Marchetti, Pierre Schaeffer.
Sound An Acoulogical Treatise (Book)
*2023 stock* First published in French in 1998, revised in 2010, and appearing here in English for the first time, Michel Chion's Sound addresses the philosophical, interpretive, and practical questions that inform our encounters with sound. Chion considers how cultural institutions privilege some sounds above others and how spurious distinctions between noise and sound guide the ways we hear and value certain sounds. He critiques the tenacious tendency to understand sounds in relation to their …
Musiques concretes 1988-91
Brocoli continues to unearth Michel Chion’s unreleased gems, after the concrete melodrama Tu and the collection of early works Musiques Concrètes 1970-71. This time it focuses on the period from 1988 to 1991, starting with 10 études de musique concrète, a series of obsessive pieces, sounding in turns dry and liquid. While Variations smashes a waltz theme to pieces, Crayonnés Ferroviaires is a work and manifesto, an ode to the tape recorder and to the possibilities offered by the microphone and m…
Filarium
In 1998, the Cultural Centre Andre Malraux of Vandoeuvre-Les-Nancy commissioned Michel Chion, Lionel Marchetti and Jerome Noetinger to collaborate on a work of musique concrete. Les 120 jours was the result - a fresco for which the composers exchanged a mass of sounds from multiple origins, that each had worked, transformed and recomposed in their own style.For this new commission (2014-2015), the work was realised in two stages. Firstly, during several recording sessions at the CFMI of Lyon (Un…
La tentation de saint-Antoine
Another master piece from Michel Chion reissued by Nuun in this serie directed by Lionel Marchetti. 'Concrète series by Lionel Marchetti. A concrete melodrama consisting of a prologue and nine tableaux adapted from Flaubert. With Pierre Schaeffer (as St Anthony), Michèle Bokanowski Ennoïa, the Narrator), Art Leroi-Bibbs (the Preacher), Korinna Rahls-Frisius (the Queen of Sheba), Michel Chion (the Announcer). Jointly commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the INA.GRM and radio Fra…
Musiques concretes 1970-71
Brocoli is pleased to announce the release of seven early works by Michel Chion, the celebrated musique concrète composer. Composed before he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1971 his characteristic style and sounds are already present. The abrasive electronics and sanctity in Blanche prefigure 1973's Requiem; Sonatine and Train de pianos are based on prepared piano improvisations; Habanera and L'Oiseau en Cage evoke La Ronde, and Le Ciel Tremble is the composer's first…
La messe de terre
A two-part audio-logo-visual Liturgy. Created on August 28th 1996 at the Video Art festival in Locarno. This DVD edition is dedicated to Jean-Patrick Lebel. 'Figurative but non narrative fresco, La Messe de Terre superposes, without mixing them up, the everyday world, the 'here below', a world where the earth is crossed or riddled by water, and the latin text of the catholic mass. This text, chanted or shouted, is made comprehensible by French subtitles and optional English subtitles. The whole …
La vie en prose
Outstanding!!! La vie en prose is Michel Chion's first musical work composed in the 2000s. Thanks to musique concrète ways and means, it fulfils the composer's childhood dream of composing a Symphony of Energy in four movements of sharp contrasts. There’s no narrative in this one hour and a half long Symphony, but a cast of characters, some vocal, instrumental themes and sounds that circulate, disappear, pop up, stretch, decline and lose themselves in time. This work features analogue and digita…
Diktat
RESTOCKED This is another great piece of musique concrete from Michel Chion. Never published before ! Composed in 1979 at the GMEM studios in Marseille. Comes with a 16 page booklet with texts from Michel Chion and Lionel Marchetti.TheWire beautiful review Michel Chion proposes three different modes of listening : causal, semantic and reduced. The first relates simply to a sound’s source or causal agent. The second involves a desire to extract meaning, or meaningful action. Reduced listening …
Requiem
Produced at the studios of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and commissioned by the Ina-GRM in Paris (France) and was premiered on March 19, 1973 at the Théâtre Récamier in Paris, in a concert given by the GRM. "The Requiem was composed whilst thinking about the troubled minority of the living, rather than the silent majority of the dead. Also, I tried to turn this oratorio into a "great sonic show," cinemascope music. One can detect the obvious (at least to me) influence of a few filmmakers a…
Les 120 jours
For Les 120 Jours, Michel Chion, Lionel Marchetti and Jérôme Noetinger assembled a common bank of many original sounds which each of them had worked on, transformed and re-composed in his own style. This gives the listener the ability to hear a musical language in the form of collage-citations, which, for this occassion, they also named a 'concrete diversion'. Musique concrète composed in 1997/98 for the Festival Musique Action, 16 May 1998, at Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France.Limited edition of 100…
l'Opera concret
Michel Chion's music concrete from 1971-1997, mostly inspired by classical forms. The compositions are 'Etude d'apres Beethoven' and excerpts from other works. Opera is the central theme. As Chion says, "With concrete music, we can create an 'opera for the ear' in which the composer, because he is working on a sound that is fixed, with its own time and space, finds himself with the possibility of providing the music, decors, lighting and also conducting and directing this theater of louspeakers.…
On n’arrête pas le regret
LAST COPIES, already out of print - Beatiful early compositions for the well known INA composer: 'Sambas pour un jour de pluie' (1985), 'La machine à passer le temps' (1972), 'On n'arrête pas le regret' (1975)
Preludes a la vie
LAST COPIES, already out of print: Préludes à la vie (Preludes to Life) combines pieces from 1972 to 1991 in two electronic operas. In Le prisonnier du son (The Prisoner of Sound) a single human voice tells the story of a lone character trapped in a world of manipulated sounds. The title piece is a series of technical exercises in the possibilities of musique concrète.
This second album on empreintes DIGITALes, as with the first one, consists of very different works which are quite separated in …
TU
BROCOLI is proud to release Michel chion's masterpiece, his concrete melodrama TU. Composed in 1977 and reworked in 1996, it is now available for the first time on record for Mozart Year 2006! Indeed, TU's Franco-German libretto is based both on the spoken scenes of Mozart's famous opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) and on verses from French poet Robert Desnos (taken from his Corps et Biens). This dense text is sometimes declaimed, at other times roared or murmured by 15 interpreters, inclu…