Malefices

2013 release. Cacophonic presents Malefices, an outstanding film score by Pierre Henry, often overlooked in lists of the composer's work. The score is a dream record for fans of early electronics, female vocal manipulation, and horror soundtracks. Widely recognized as one of the original sonic architects of the movement known as musique concrete (having joined Pierre Schaeffer's initiative as early as 1949), Pierre Henry was arguably the first musician to entertain the notion of this defiant musical revolution coexisting with traditional and popular music. Initially using the media of modern dance and spoken word as a platform to contextualize his tape-music mutations (notably in unison with Maurice Bejart), Henry's fusion of academic with thematic ideas led to the birth of electronic sound design for film and theatre, exemplified most prevalently in the macabre. His score for Henri Decoin's 1962 film Mal+-fices (Where the Truth Lies) (starring Juliette Gr+-co) is the missing link between his earliest avant-garde recordings and his later celebrated pop experiments with Michel Colombier and Spooky Tooth. It rivals such cinematic sound as Daphne Oram's work for Jack Clayton's 1961 horror film the Innocents, and features Henry at what is perhaps his most melodic, fragile, and enchanting (especially for this unforgiving, formative era in his career). Layering vocal tape loops and gossamer feminine voice treatments with plucked strings, white noise wind, and brooding, industrial treated piano textures, Henry magnifies the film's intoxicated, hallucinatory narrative. This concise set of complete themes is presented here, fully remastered for the first time, alongside rare excerpts from two of the composer's very earliest and least obtainable forays into theatrical sound design: instrumental parts of Henry's first stereo reconstruction of Maurice Bejart's 1961 ballet Orph+-e, and his seldom-heard concrete interludes from Darius Milhaud and Max Gerard's opera Mariage de la Feuille et du Cliche (1958).