Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp @ Deering Oaks Park Bandstand

Our 2nd free community concert of the summer! The 12-piece band from Switzerland instills punk energy into their traveling orchestra, bringing in musicians and influence from all over the world for a hypnotic and border-defying sound. 

Founded in 2006 by Vincent Bertholet (Hyperculte), the Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp is a large-scale project. Designed as a real orchestra, the size of the ensemble has varied over time. Now with 12 members, the ensemble has scoured the stages of Europe to demonstrate that the formula “the more the merrier” has never been more true than on stage.

Whether in prestigious festivals (Paléo Festival de Nyon, Fusion Festival, Incubate, Womad, Bad Bonn Kilbi, Jazz à la Vilette) or on the four albums released since its launch, the group shows an incredible fluidity. The Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp (a mischievous title in homage to traditional African groups: Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono n°1, Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrytmo etc… and to one of the greatest dynamizers of 20th century art) embraces the forms of its musicians while pushing them to their limits. The result is a powerful, experimental, unstable, and terribly alive organic sound.

These characteristics can be found on We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway, the fifth opus of the band. Built around 12 musicians extirpated from their respective biotope, it develops a repetitive musicality which, deployed in successive waves, creates a feeling of trance. Mixing free jazz, post punk, high life, brass band, symphonic mixtures and kraut rock, their sound goes beyond the limits of genre. Transcendental, almost ritualistic, the music is hypnotic, dizzying, and obsessively precise, coupled with powerful lyrics, declaimed in rage against a world that is falling apart.

Supported in part by a NEST grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts.