condition (record/cover): VG+ (light surface noise) / VG+ (general wear)

A 12" EP issued on Jean-Marc Vivenza's own Électro-Institut imprint, produced in Grenoble where Vivenza had been based since founding the Institut in 1983. Machines belongs to the first decade of Vivenza's solo work (which began in 1983 after the dissolution of his earlier Mécanique Populaire group) and represents one of the clearest single-object statements of his working method.

Vivenza's position on noise is rigorous and philosophically articulated: the music is bruitist (in the specific futurist sense inherited from Luigi Russolo's 1913 L'Arte Dei Rumori and explicitly theorised in Vivenza's own parallel writings on "the objective materiality of noise") rather than musique-concrète or industrial as those terms are conventionally used. The raw material is not processed or abstracted: Vivenza records real machines, factories, workers in action, and presents the recordings as the sonic substance of the composition itself.

The 12" EP format allowed Vivenza to work at a scale that sat between the 7" single (which had defined his 1984 Fondements Bruitistes) and the full LP (Réalités Servomécaniques, 1984). The sound-world is continuous with the 1984 work: grinding industrial surfaces, impact patterns from heavy machinery, rhythmically positioned but deliberately unaltered factory-floor material. One of the essential European post-industrial objects of the period, and the point at which Vivenza's Russolo-derived bruitist programme became fully visible.