PUTNEY — The Next Stage Bandwagon Summer Series presents Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp (OTPMD) on Saturday, Sept. 16, at 5 p.m., at the Putney Inn, 57 Putney Landing Rd.
OTPMD's sound integrates free jazz, post-punk, highlife, brass band, symphonic mixtures and kraut rock.
"Of all the concerts we're hosting this summer for the Bandwagon Series, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp's music is easily the most adventurous, daring, and worth listening to. We hope this is the beginning of being able to host them when they tour the U.S.," Keith Marks, executive director of Next Stage Arts, said in a news release.
Founded in 2006 by Vincent Bertholet (also of Hyperculte), OTPMD is a large-scale project. Designed as a real orchestra, the size of the ensemble has varied over time and now has 12 members.
Whether in prestigious festivals (Paléo Festival de Nyon, Womad, Bad Bonn Kilbi, Jazz à la Vilette) or on the four albums released since its launch, "the group shows an incredible fluidity," say organizers.
OTPMD (a title in homage to traditional African groups such as Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono (1)N°1 and Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrytmo) "embraces the forms of its musicians while pushing them to their limits. The result is a powerful, experimental, unstable and terribly alive, organic sound," say organizers.
These characteristics can be found on We're OK But We're Lost Anyway, the fifth opus of the band. "It develops a repetitive musicality which, deployed in successive waves, creates a feeling of trance."
Their music has been described as "transcendental, hypnotic, almost ritualistic," and "somewhere between Hugo Ball's phonetic psalms, a Sufi procession that turns into a brawl and a voodoo ritual."
Tickets are $20 advance, $25 at the door, and kids 12 and under are free. Advance tickets are available online at nextstagearts.org. Next Stage will provide a beer, wine, and cocktail cash bar, and food from Crossroads Tacos and Vermont Gelato will be available. Bring lawn chairs or blankets for outdoor seating on the lawn. For more information, call 802-387-0102.
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