Cover of We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway., artwork by Brian Case.
The collective Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp was founded in Geneva in the ’00 years of New Millenium. With several ever-changing formations directed by the double bassist Vincent Bertholet, their sound navigates between oblique rhythmic lines and dissonant baroque pop, which the orchestral format recalls many similar examples in Europe, like Muito Kaballa, Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra, Addict Ameba, etc…
In the following part, Vincent Bertholet will be interviewed about the last album by OTPMD named Ventre Unique, released in 2024 by Bongo Joe Records (a Genevian label founded by Vincent and Cyril Yeterian), and the previous work We’re Ok But We’re Lost Anyway (Bongo Joe Records, 2021).
Simply speaking, your album We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway is your best work and especially one of the most beautiful records of the New Millennium. The record is permeated by jangly poetry which defines mesh mosaics that are tridimensionally projected in a Swiss landscape, similar to the mosaical schemes created by the Italian artist Gino Severini which are found in some churches in Switzerland, where spirituality encounters freedom in complex and harmonical shape. For example, the piece We Can Can We astonished by two recurrent elements in the album, which here are concretized insightfully; the angolous rhythm which is developed marching, and a catchy melody in the sign of a complete baroque pop spirit, where this union meets the general enthusiasm of the listener. Let’s talk about the attitude behind the album and the relatively fervid context.
Moreover, the first track, Be Patient, is a calm entanglement converging to a rhythmic pulse, which shades to its living, expressive centrality. The cadenced walking concept returns in the following song Empty Skies, where melody and other contrapunctual noises gives life in a helicoidal way. Both tracks serve as an introduction, where the listener navigates between cacophonic and consonant sonorities as landscapes, which are characterized by an unexpected fashion. Let’s talk about this preliminary part in the album.
“I couldn’t say anything better that what you said about these two songs. Congrats!”
So Many Things (To Feel Guilty About) has a properly chamber-ish development, where tense moments are alternated to airious and self-conclusive hooks. Everything taps into a less contemplated scheme, indeed it appears as originally the usage of spoken word technique, as auxiliary to the dynamical flow of the bridge. Can you talk about how the relative ideas happened?
“For this album, and for all the precedent, I always start the composition from a bass loop. I’m improvising with my doublebass and loopers and effect, and then when something close to the transe is coming, I keep this bass line, that I try to keep very minimalistic, and add the rest. It’s important that the bass line has a minimum notes, to leave space for all the other instruments. There is no preconceived ideas when I write the music, it’s just a thread I pull, which often leads me towards unknown territories. I love being carried away by the music. It is more when we talk about the words that we choose a direction. I wanted to ask Aby Vulliamy, who was a member of the band at this time, to write the lyrics and sing on this one. “Too many things to feel guilty about”, was in an email she sent me. I liked this sentence, and told her that it ws a good start for this song. I send her also a link to the following song by Phil Cohran.
“Telling Aby that I’d like to start this song with a choir in this spirit. And then the rest of the vocal part is Aby’s work. I compose the music of each song, and the singer usually compose her vocal part.”
A musical flow named Flux, characterized by tonal, familiar shapes, encounters an oblique carillion of noisy percussions in the middle, where the melodic part terminates introducing a self-conclusive bridge unexpectedly. So, can you talk about how this varied consistency happened?
“I’m sorry, but I’m very bad about speaking about my music. You are very good at it, I should ask you next time we need a press kit! As I said earlier, I follow the thread. On this album “We’re OK….” Each song has a same processus, first bass line, then I had the rest with a midi keayboard. It goes where it goes. Then the direction can change when we work together. I give all the musicians a midi version of the song, and we start working from it. It moves of course, basically the structure is the same from the midi version but some parts that I wrote doesn’t work at all when the band plays it.
“Flux is a very good example. What I wrote was a bit too dense, too complicated, there was too much things in it, and we had a lot of difficulties to make a live version. I finally decided to keep a minimum, basically the strings at the beginning, the drums in the second part, horns as an intro and outro. Then Liz put this wonderful vocal part on 1st part, I’ve put this mantra on the drums part.”
Let’s talk about the last album Ventre Unique, which unifies your baroque spirit with a percussive creativity of Afro declination. So, can you talk about the creative approach for this record?
“This one is a turn in my process of composition. First of all, it was the first time in my life (I’m 51 years old) that I was only doing music for a living. So I had the chance to do 2 compositions residencies to write the music of this album. I spent 10 days in Hambourg, in the studio of Sven Kacirek, and 2 weeks in Napoli, in a small flat in Montesanto. And for the first time, I didn’t used my doublebass as a beginning of composition. I work with my computer, and I think there is a difference in the result. I usually write music in my studio in Geneva, with my everyday routine, and other jobs I can do for paying the rent, so it was different to be in a totally new environment, only focused on music. As I always, I follow the thread, without any concept at all. I was totally open to everything. I also wanted to have different singers on this one, as Liz decide to do a break with touring.”
Cover of Ventre Unique, artwork by Dove Perspicacius.
Breath and Coagule have different shapes with a particular rhythmical sight for both. Breath has a granular consistency with a melodic break, in opposition to Coagule which shows a constant and linear pulse majorly. These two songs can be seen as two siamese divertissements, and on the other side demonstrate partially insightful writing in the record, which is harmonically organic among the tracklist pieces, in comparison to the previous album, where many songs have independently proper living during the listening. So how did this dichotomous approach happen for the mentioned part in the record?
“I always try to find a balance between all the different atmospheres of the songs. The only concept on this new album was maybe that: to find very different moods, and trying to go in new territories where we had’nt been before.”
Smile Like A Flower is an outlier in the album, which dislocates from the percussive character on behalf of a more smooth, baroque pop form in the associated writing. A European soul swims in the African magma of the album with the most evident testimony represented by the above-described track. So how did this craftsmanship happen?
“This one was the most difficult to finish to me. It is the last song who arrived in the album. This mood was missing in the album, a kind of slow evolution on a minimalist pattern, which grows slowly and slowly, something we have on all our precedent album, and that I want to be present at least once per album. I wrote many versions of the song, and everytime we were trying to play it live, during our work session, it was not working. I tried maybe 4/5 marimba parts, I wanted to have them important in this song. As for Flux, at the end I kept the minimum. Then the vocal part was difficult to find. I’ve asked 4 singers before Mara arrived. I had an idea about the singing, but I was unable to explain it and was not happy with the propositions I received. And then Mara came, she was joining us for a tour in the Balkans till Greece, we did in May 2024, for a video she was working on. And once we were talkin about this video project, I asked her to try something on this song, as I was desperate to find a vocal part on it. And then she proposed that, and I was very happy. This is what I was waiting for for this song. Mara is part of the band now.”