Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp is a perpetually evolving ‘orchestra’, loosely modelled on the great 20th-century African groups like Tout Puissant Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou and tipping its hat to revolutionary French artist Marcel Duchamp.
New album “Ventre Unique” – their sixth, and the successor to 2021’s acclaimed We’re Ok But We’re Lost Anyway – is as exuberant as it is emotionally fraught with a dream amalgam of folk, krautrock, post-punk and African rhythms that feels both uncluttered and beautifully organic.
The album has been released on Bongo Joe Records (Vincent Bertholet co-founded the label with Cyril Yeterian), with band and label both sharing a collective vision that was forged from Geneva’s punk history and squat scene. It finds them once again exploring contemporary anxieties and setting them to music that balances fat, loping grooves – built around simple loops written by Bertholet – sparkling marimba, strident horns and strings with dissonance and angular guitar riffs. The beautiful sleeve art comes courtesy of French painter Dove Perspicacius. The recording of Ventre Unique took place over ten days in a studio near Paris, Studio Midilive in Villetaneuse, and was overseen by Johannes Buff who mixed the previous “We’re Ok But We’re Lost Anyway.”
The orchestra is comprised of an international cast of 12 musicians including many OTPMD regulars: Frenchman Gilles Poizat on bugle, lead vocalist Liz Moscarola, two marimba players (Aïda Diop and Elena Beder), two drummers (Gabriel Valtchev and Guillaume Lantonnet), guitarists (Romane Millet and Titi), a trombonist (Gif), a viola-player (Thomas Malnati-Levier), a cellist (Naomi Mabanda) and Bertholet on double bass. Every one of the musicians is a singer too, contributing to the glorious mass of vocals that gives OTPMD songs their emotional resonance and ritualistic power. They also worked with new vocalists: Mara Krastina (who will be more involved with the group in future) from Swiss band Massicot on Smiling Like A Flower and François Marry from French group Frànçois and the Atlas Mountains – you can hear the latter’s distinctively lilting tone on Tout Haut. Following the release of We’re Ok But We’re Lost Anyway also on Swiss label Bongo Joe, the group – a travelling party of 14 people, including two sound engineers – crossed numerous borders themselves, playing around 150 shows and touring in territories they’d never visited before: Canada, USA, the Balkans, Greece.