Brampton native and eclectic musician and composer Pleasant Wealthy Marsella is about to launch his seventeenth album titled The Birds of Marsville. Will probably be the second launch for indie label We Are Busy Our bodies, and will probably be accessible in each bodily and digital obtain type on August 15.
The premise of the album is that this: a form of area information to birds of the city of Marsville in musical and inventive type. The first instrument is a mechanical road organ, normal by Henk Degraauw.
The twist — Marsville is a fictional city, stuffed 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 Nineties, producing 17 albums — together with the present one — in quite a lot of genres that embrace 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 area researcher by the identify of C. Smalloochi creates fowl songs from the distinctive species discovered on the misplaced island of Marsville.
That’s the fiction. The truth is that the sphere 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 presents 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 reside on the 2021 Guelph Jazz Pageant.
Composed and produced by Marsella, the album contains 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 attention-grabbing orchestral combine made much more attention-grabbing by one in every of Marsella’s devices — and an acknowledged “obsession”.
Pleasant Wealthy Marsella
Alongside along with his recording profession, Marsella has additionally composed music for the Tom Inexperienced Present, and toured via each North America and Europe along with his band Lollipop Individuals, acting at Fusion Pageant in Germany, the Balkan Fever Pageant and Danube Pageant in Vienna, amongst others. Lollipop Individuals 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 equivalent to Toca Loca and Continuum Modern 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 automobile for neighborhood improvement. Marsella additionally studied composition beneath Gary Kulesha, R. Murray Schafer and Alexander Rapaport.
Pleasant Wealthy Marsella: The Interview
“Principally, I’ve been into mechanical road organs for a great 15, 20 years,” Wealthy begins. Henk Degraauw, 88, is a pal who’s additionally primarily based in Brampton. “He constructed this mechanical road 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 lovely a chunk of artwork.” It was his first response. “It simply sounds so magical.”
When it got here to repertoire, although, Henk was stunned. 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 all the time wished to start out engaged on a bigger mission that’s a sequence of various items,” Marsella says.
The suite, which incorporates 76 fictional fowl portraits, simply match right into a cycle of works. It’s additionally simply the primary of his deliberate initiatives 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 specifically. “It’s all in my head,” he says. “I believed 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 form of an after thought,” he says. “I obtained people taking part in with it. It virtually broke the people that performed on the file,” he laughs.
“I’m tremendous happy with it.”
Will there be a live performance efficiency of the complete instrumentation?
“Possibly there’s a spot for it within the live performance corridor,” he speculates. “That’s a enjoyable thought.” A mechanical instrument presents audiences a brand new expertise. “That was in the back of my thoughts — you may have this machine, you might as nicely write strains that individuals can’t play.”
He credit the musicians for his or her virtuosity. “They’re a few of the heaviest hitters I do know.”
In fact, bringing the advanced mechanical road organ on tour is one other matter completely. He’s engaged on a price range and funding for attainable pageant appearances in 2026.
“It’s a tough factor to lug round. The price range behind the entire thing is actual,” he notes. The recording is meant to work as a stand alone expertise as nicely.
- Discover particulars concerning 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 a long time, and a inventive writing teacher for Ontariolearn.