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Cinq Portes Soudées Part 1
Cinq Portes Soudées Part 2

ETANT DONNES Cinq Portes Soudées

CD album | gg472
Etant Donnes is a French duo named after Marcel Duchamp's last major work. The group consists of brothers Marc and Eric Hurtado, born in Morocco and working mainly as performance artists and musicians. Their sound can be described as a mix of field recordings, found sounds and sometimes whispered, sometimes violent vocals. They describe their sounds like this: "Through Marc and Eric, it is the volume of each word that becomes an object-sculpture, together with the power of their bodies expressing their voices. Each event is a scream - indeed even the glissando - of the strength of the word that sometimes abruptly becomes a rock, a solid surface, not in the least fluvial, as is the narrative of a tale, novel or poetic epic. With both of them, there is no more trace of ancient prosodies, no more trace of the incomprehensible Sainte-Beuve who could claim: "I have to collect a volume of prose". The word, the voice, the volume take shape with each other, unveiling a theatre that theatre usually ignores, which has given it such things as a Samuel Beckett's Fin de Partie." Over the years Etant Donnes have collaborated with people like Lydia Lunch, Michael Gira, Alan Vega and Genesis P-Orridge. Cinq Portes Soudées was the band's fifth album, originally released on Die Form's Bain Total label in 1984 on cassette only. For this CD re-issue we have added a long bonus track not on the original album. Full tracklist: 1. Cinq Portes Soudées Part 1 2. Cinq Portes Soudées Part 2 3. Music from the film Des autres terres souples Part 4. Price: € 19,-/copy incl. worldwide shipping.

In these old works, real instruments play a significant role. Guitar and bass, but played not always very traditionally, in a no-wave, early post-punk fashion. This is quite interesting as, according to the cover, these recordings are from 1977 and 1978, and in those days, this kind of no-wave playing wasnt worldwide spread. Along with this, the two brothers also use all sorts of objects as percussion, sometimes leaping off into a wild ramble of drumming. There are also early signs of using tape manipulation, loops and cut-ups, even when not as strong a presence as in the releases of the mid-1980s.
(Vital Weekly, August 2024)