Lionel Marchetti

Where are you now?

In Lyon, in our apartment.

Where would you like to be?

I’m fine here.

What have you been doing lately?

I’m helping my daughter with her homework, she’s in sixth grade.

What can you hear right now?

Right now in Lyon, dawn is unusually blue. Birds, numerous, enchanting—a few days ago, I saw a group of wild swans flying up the Rhone; and slowly, they entered the city. 

Are you taking advantage of this containment period to make music?

Writing in the morning, composing in the afternoon, working out and training every other day, all intertwined with helping my daughter with her homework and cooking various inventions… In fact, this is my usual schedule, but this time with a different kind of focus; I used to write in cafés early in the morning.

Concerning composition, I’m currently finishing PLANKTOS, which will be online on Bandcamp in the next few days. It’s a large ‘musique concrete’ piece, more than three hours long, in an oceanic shape, in 5 parts, 19 sections, which I started 4 years ago.

This piece is mainly based on Régis Poulet’s eponym poetic work, published by Isolato

« plongeons
plongeons plus loin
plongeons pour dépasser
les temps d'horreur de l'industrie
baleinière et tous ses massacres

— un salut
à Melville
mais plongeons
plus loin encore
et noyons la métaphysique
dans les masses mouvantes et panocéaniques »

translation:

“let’s dive,
let’s dive deeper
let’s dive to outrun
the horrific times of the whale hunting
industry and all its massacres

—wave
to Melville
but let’s dive
deeper and deeper
and let’s drown metaphysics
in the moving panoceanic masses”

Régis Poulet - excerpt from Planktos (2018)

I have finished an analysis/interpretation essay on DIKTAT, a marvelous melodrama by Michel Chion; the text will be published soon. In the same vein, I should finish an analysis of LA NOIRE À SOIXANTE by Pierre Henry before the end of the containment, which has been dragging on for a few years so far.
Back from Benin in January, just before the containment, I also finished a poetic collection following my trip in this incredible country with the musicians of the band Akpé Jô Mimi. We were in Benin for the traditional voodoo day, “Fête du Vodou”.

At last, final touches and editing of a poetic suite written in the early 2000s, entitled Nostalgie du Cyclope (“Nostalgia of the Cyclop”) in La Revue des Ressources, and you can read it here: https://www.larevuedesressources.org/Nostalgie-du-Cyclope-1-3.html


How will the world be after all this?

If each and everyone’s energy was channeled into trying to have a healthy relationship with our planet Earth, and especially to live in a poetic relationship with the World, that would not be that bad. But each and every one of us have a left hand and a right hand.
About progress, about vigilance.
Kenneth White said somewhere “Learning the self is forgetting the self”.

How can we support the music community?

By setting up as many concerts as possible, as soon as possible; French Music creation centers should focus more on diffusion for the works they commissioned, rather than programming them only once and then leaving them out in “dusty boxes”.

Acousmatic tours!

Five musical recommendations?

A wonderful flute player (bamboo flute), to whom I was recently introduced by Michel Doneda, called Watazumi Doso Roshi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWUBC18yw_A

Pleasantly surprised with Cosmos by Murcof
https://murcofmusic.bandcamp.com/album/cosmos

Emmanuel Holterbach’s ‘musique concrete’ works.
https://emmanuelholterbach.bandcamp.com

Jim O'Rourke - to magnetize money and catch a roving eye
https://www.sonoris.org/product/jim-orourke-magnetize-money-return-roving-eye/

Jérôme Nœtinger & Anthony Pateras - A Sunset For Walter
Voice Crack - Earflash.

One book?

Several books:

L’Esprit Nomade by Kenneth White, just like any other collection of his poems.
The Gospel of Thomas, translated and commented by Jean-Yves Leloup, or any other book by the same author.
Le Grand sommeil des éveillés by Daniel Odier or any other book by the same author.
Somnambule du jour, poems by Anise Koltz, or any other book of poetry by the same author.
The Wild God of the World, An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers
And especially the magnificent Journal du réel gravé sur un bâton by Michel Jourdan.

What will you do when you're out?

I will go as fast as possible to the Alps, on the heights, on the edge of a mountain stream to immerse myself into the transparent and freezing water, to listen to the mountain's might, to appreciate its living complexity, with some poems by the Chinese poet Li Po, by the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge, by Kathleen Raine or by the Japanese poets Saigyô or Santoka, and this, while holding in my hand my notebook and a pen…

Links :
compositions & collaborations :
lionelmarchetti.bandcamp.com
writings  :
larevuedesressources.org

Photo :
Kyo Marchetti-Higashi