Brampton native and eclectic musician and composer Pleasant Wealthy Marsella is about to launch his seventeenth album titled The Birds of Marsville. It will likely be the second launch for indie label We Are Busy Our bodies, and might be accessible in each bodily and digital obtain type on August 15.
The premise of the album is that this: a sort of discipline information to birds of the city of Marsville in musical and creative type. The first instrument is a mechanical avenue organ, long-established by Henk Degraauw.
The twist — Marsville is a fictional city, filled with fictional however fascinating birds.
Pleasant Wealthy Marsella is a novel determine within the Toronto space music ecosystem. He’s been energetic as a performing and recording artist for the reason that mid Nineteen Nineties, producing 17 albums — together with the present one — in quite a lot of genres that embody punk-vaudeville fusion, and what he calls a “wayward”, but full, rendition of Mussorgsky’s Photos At An Exhibition.
We requested him about The Birds of Marsville.
The Birds of Marsville
An 18th-century Hungo-Italian anthropologist and discipline researcher by the identify of C. Smalloochi creates chicken songs from the distinctive species discovered on the misplaced island of Marsville.
That’s the fiction. The fact is that the sector information is a collaboration between Marsella and multidisciplinary artist David C. Hannan that, together with the music, options pantings of birds like The Honker, The Bum Bum, and The Faculty Shooters.
Musically, the album affords microtonality, influences of artists like Harry Partch and Ennio Morricone, and extra, blended out and in of one another with a carnivalesque sensibility. The music premiered stay on the 2021 Guelph Jazz Pageant.
Composed and produced by Marsella, the album includes a roster of high tier Toronto musicians that features, along with multi-instrumentalist Marsella, Gregory Oh on piano and organ, Nichol S. Robertson on electrical guitar, Ed Reifel on orchestral percussion, and Tom Richards on trombone and tuba.
It’s an fascinating orchestral combine made much more fascinating by considered one of Marsella’s devices — and an acknowledged “obsession”.
Pleasant Wealthy Marsella
Alongside together with his recording profession, Marsella has additionally composed music for the Tom Inexperienced Present, and toured by means of each North America and Europe together with his band Lollipop Folks, acting at Fusion Pageant in Germany, the Balkan Fever Pageant and Danube Pageant in Vienna, amongst others. Lollipop Folks has carried out at Canadian festivals, together with Guelph Jazz Pageant, Pageant Worldwide de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Halifax Jazz Pageant, Newfoundland Music on the Rocks and on the Western Entrance in Vancouver.
He based and ran the Brampton Indie Arts Pageant for a number of years. Marsella has produced radio essays and documentaries for CBC Radio One, and his work has been commissioned by ensembles akin to Toca Loca and Continuum Up to date Music.
Marsella accomplished his PhD in Music Schooling from the College of Toronto in 2021, and his doctoral analysis was on musical playgrounds as a car for group improvement. Marsella additionally studied composition underneath Gary Kulesha, R. Murray Schafer and Alexander Rapaport.
Pleasant Wealthy Marsella: The Interview
“Mainly, I’ve been into mechanical avenue organs for a great 15, 20 years,” Wealthy begins. Henk Degraauw, 88, is a buddy who’s additionally primarily based in Brampton. “He constructed this mechanical avenue organ, and some years again, he gifted it to me.”
Marsella describes it as midi pushed, and that includes greater than 100 pipes. “This man could make an accordion play with out a human behind it,” he says. “I’ve gotta begin writing for this factor. It’s too stunning a chunk of artwork.” It was his first response. “It simply sounds so magical.”
When it got here to repertoire, although, Henk was shocked. The same old music for the instrument falls into the beer barrel polka class. Wealthy was composing up to date music.
“I performed the piece for him, and he virtually fell over,” he says.
The Album
“I’ve at all times wished to begin engaged on a bigger venture that’s a collection of various items,” Marsella says.
The suite, which incorporates 76 fictional chicken portraits, simply match right into a cycle of works. It’s additionally simply the primary of his deliberate tasks that may contain the misplaced island of Marsville.
“That is simply one of many [works] I’m doing for this imaginary island.”
The identify consists of a compilation of his identify and his spouse’s final identify, and it resembles nowhere on earth particularly. “It’s all in my head,” he says. “I assumed it was an open ended idea sufficient to permit for future [experiments].”
The Music
“I used to be actually impressed by Conlan Nancarrow,” he says. “All his participant piano music actually impressed me — writing music that’s virtually not humanly playable. I wasn’t attempting to interrupt the machine, however to push the machine.”
His debut on the Guelph Jazz Pageant was as a one-man present.
“I wished to file it. That was sort of an after thought,” he says. “I obtained people enjoying with it. It virtually broke the people that performed on the file,” he laughs.
“I’m tremendous pleased with it.”
Will there be a live performance efficiency of the complete instrumentation?
“Perhaps there’s a spot for it within the live performance corridor,” he speculates. “That’s a enjoyable thought.” A mechanical instrument affords audiences a brand new expertise. “That was in the back of my thoughts — you may have this machine, you could as nicely write traces that individuals can’t play.”
He credit the musicians for his or her virtuosity. “They’re a number of the heaviest hitters I do know.”
After all, bringing the complicated mechanical avenue organ on tour is one other matter completely. He’s engaged on a funds and funding for attainable competition appearances in 2026.
“It’s a tough factor to lug round. The funds behind the entire thing is actual,” he notes. The recording is meant to work as a stand alone expertise as nicely.
- Discover particulars in regards to the recording, and stream or purchase it, [HERE].
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Anya Wassenberg is the Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. Beforehand, she was a contract author with a specialty in tradition and journey for 3 many years, and a artistic writing teacher for Ontariolearn.
