Discover Musique Actuelle
Listening suggestions from Artistic Director, Scott Thomson
Originally, I was solicited for a list of recordings that would represent –– and therefore usefully introduce new audiences to –– the history of musique actuelle. This seemed an unreasonably difficult task, seeing how the field encompasses work from several decades, from every continent, and drawing on and synthesising virtually every musical genre and method… And I haven’t heard it all! How could I? Each time I try to get a sense of the field overall, it seems once again to have grown exponentially, a harbinger of creativity and human spirit, but not of a comprehensive knowledge of (nor a useful synoptic list of recordings of) musique actuelle.
Instead of a list of records, here are five record labels that were key sites of new discovery when I was a young listener. As a curator myself, I’m drawn to the way labels evoke, reflect, produce, and/or refract (in a word, curate) the aesthetics of the artists they release, creating (to different degrees) trans-geographical and trans-temporal nexuses of artistic practice… something like a field, or a field within a field. It’s the reason the expression “the Blue Note sound” means something to jazz fans, and these labels, while less renowned than Blue Note Records, have worked to do something similar in their corners of the musique actuelle topography. Each captured my attention as I started to chart my own course through those territories.
Obviously, this list (like any list) is reductive and weak for its many omissions –– it could easily be five times as long. Listeners who are interested in music that has been presented at FIMAV should of course be directed to the festival’s historically affiliate label, Les Disques Victo, still run by founding artistic director, Michel Levasseur. However, for new listeners curious about what (where, who, how) musique actuelle is, I believe that one could do worse than start with the many wonderful records these five have gifted us, and which have forged my conception of the field as it exists today.
Hat Hut (Hat Art, Hatology, etc.)
This Swiss label was founded in 1974 to document the work of American multi-instrumentalist and composer, Joe McPhee, but its various imprints have featured important (in some cases, indispensably classic) recordings by Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Vienna Art Orchestra, Steve Lacy, Franz Koglmann, John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Gerry Hemingway, Paul Plimley, and so many others, unifying diverse creative practices including contemporary composition, jazz composition and improvisation, electronics, and free improvisation through careful curatorial choices, generally excellent sound quality, and dynamic, coherent graphic design and accompanying critical apparatuses. https://www.hathut.com/
FMP/Free Music Production
Originally a cooperative founded in the late 1960s, this Berlin label later functioned under the sole guidance of Jost Gebers, releasing the vital music of the era by Peter Brötzmann (who also contributed many graphic elements), Alexander von Schlippenbach, Peter Kowald, Globe Unity Orchestra, etc. along the way. If Hat Hut covers a broader swath of artistic approaches, FMP focuses more deeply on the new expressionism emerging from the German free-jazz/free-improvisation movements and their kin, mostly from Europe but not exclusively. The 11-disc project, Cecil Taylor in Berlin ’88, featuring the great American pianist collaborating for the first time with so many important European musicians, alone assures FMP’s status as an indispensable label. https://destination-out.bandcamp.com/
Tzadik
By the time he founded Tzadik records in 1995, John Zorn had already established his pioneering work as a composer, saxophonist, and producer, residing at the core of New York’s Downtown scene that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. At that point, it would have been difficult to fathom that the new label would go on to produce more than 900 releases (and counting), covering the fields of rock, noise, free improvisation, klezmer, contemporary music, film music, and many more. Apart from key work by Zorn himself, records by Derek Bailey, Ikue Mori, Arnold Dreyblatt, George E. Lewis, Merzbow, Wadada Leo Smith, and Mike Patton are just a few of the standouts in this astonishing catalogue. https://www.tzadik.com/
Ambiances Magnétiques
This Montreal record label and FIMAV have grown alongside one another throughout their 40-plus-year histories, nourishing each other through their respective evolutions, so it’s only appropriate –– and for this listener, vital –– that Ambiances Magnétiques is included here. Originally run as a collective, the label was managed for decades by composer and saxophonist, Joane Hétu, featuring exemplary works of Quebecoise musique actuelle by Martin Tétreault, Michel F. Côté, Robert Marcel Lepage, Jean Derome, Ensemble SuperMusique, Diane Labrosse, Lori Freedman and so many other musicians long affiliated with FIMAV programming. It is a notable development, not just for the label but for the entire field, that the members of Quatuor Bozzini are now in charge of Ambiances Magnétiques and their distribution wing, DAME, which bodes well for the future of this august institution. https://ambiancesmagnetiques.com/fr/accueil
Thrill Jockey
More experienced listeners will note that my first four choices skew toward musics coming out of free improvisation as a core practice (or ethic), a primary locus of what I recognise as musique actuelle creative ethos. However, as the history of FIMAV programming makes abundantly clear, rock and rock-based musics are likewise at the core of any conception of the field, and the post-rock developments of Tortoise, Trans Am, and other Thrill Jockey artists are seminal to this stream of influence, and furthermore for the connection with key Chicago free jazz musicians like Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, and Chicago Underground. While there is much music on Thrill Jockey that is too popular in artistic disposition ever to be presented at festival of musique actuelle, the most boundary-pushing of it is utterly indispensable for this listener –– not the least for the impressionable moment in my life when it first reached my ears. https://www.thrilljockey.com/index
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