Michel Chion

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, including Ghedalia Tazartès and Karine Sacco. Musically, this is Michel chion's most involved and virtuoso piece of work. The sound is assertive, abrupt, cold - one could even describe it as industrial - precise and rigid, until the profound and moving finale, similar in emotional content to the most intense moments of the artist's Requiem. TU is definitely a unique work of art, bringing together literature, poetry, opera and French musique concrète. Michel chion was born in 1947 in Creil (France). In 1970, after literary and musical studies, he began to work as Pierre Schaeffer's assistant, then became publications director for the ina-GRM, where he was a member from 1971 to 1976. As a composer, he has focused on musique concrète, an idiom for which he has developed original compositional techniques across many genres: melodramas (e.g. La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, 1982), short studies and religious music (e.g. Requiem, 1973). As a filmmaker, he has directed a number of prize-winning short films and documentaries (e.g. La Messe de Terre, 1996, a 2 hour video accompanied by musique concrète). As a theorist, he has published more than 25 books which have been translated into more than 10 languages, and has contributed to numerous dictionaries and encyclopaedias. In addition, he has developed a new discipline, the systematic study of audio-visual relationships which he teaches at a number of centres and film schools. He has also followed on from Pierre Schaeffer's work and vision in defining the effects which are particular to the fixation of sound