| 27 August 2009
C Adams House @ C Venues
16-31 August, 19.30
“... it’s like that car advert...!”
Like a mother-of-five lost in Tesco on a Saturday morning hysterically looking for marmite, this thought kept dashing in and out of my mind throughout Brocante Sonore’s hour-long set.
I couldn’t think of anything more constructive, because I – for one – had never seen or heard anything quite like this bric-a-brac playing ensemble (you’ll know the one I mean, where the noises of a car window, or a flashing indicator, are digitally remixed to make a funky ‘lil dance tune).
If you translate Brocante Sonore into English you will discover that it means ‘second-hand trade sound’. Surrounded by a workshop’s generic jumble of pipes, hoses, wheels and benches, nine ‘mechanicians’ set about their day; the conceit being that the tightly-choreographed mosaic of slaps, bangs and wallops which make up Brocante Sonore’s music are just that - random noises; the by-products of a busy day. In France, this type of composition is called ‘musique concrète’, and has a long and satisfyingly ‘hoh-he-hoh-hoh’ legacy, but Brocante Sonore are so much more than the sum of their parts.
The tunes are ace, the techniques ingenious and often wonderfully off-the-wall, and their skill as musicians alone is superhuman (I am not joking – there is a moment where one ‘mechanician’, using a blown-up party balloon like a sort of rudimentary bag-pipe, squeaked out the melody from La Vie on Rose. A balloon!), but what makes this production so enjoyable and so darn-tooting clever is the concept.
Like living examples of the everyday objects which go to create this orchestra of the ordinary, the camaraderie of these ‘rude mechanicals’ - all dressed in their identikit matching boiler-suits, playing jokes on their foreman and eagerly watching the time tick by - becomes a metaphor for the strange music they ‘unthinkingly’ produce.
Go see this! Then accompany your dad down to the shed!
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