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 out there in each bodily and digital obtain kind on August 15.
The premise of the album is that this: a type of subject information to birds of the city of Marsville in musical and inventive kind. The first instrument is a mechanical road organ, original 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 lively 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 subject researcher by the identify of C. Smalloochi creates hen 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 College Shooters.
Musically, the album gives 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 dwell on the 2021 Guelph Jazz Pageant.
Composed and produced by Marsella, the album includes a roster of prime 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 all 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 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 reminiscent of 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 car for neighborhood improvement. Marsella additionally studied composition beneath Gary Kulesha, R. Murray Schafer and Alexander Rapaport.
Pleasant Wealthy Marsella: The Interview
“Mainly, I’ve been into mechanical road organs for a very good 15, 20 years,” Wealthy begins. Henk Degraauw, 88, is a good friend 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 bit 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 modern music.
“I performed the piece for him, and he nearly fell over,” he says.
The Album
“I’ve at all times needed to start out engaged on a bigger mission that’s a collection of various items,” Marsella says.
The suite, which incorporates 76 fictional hen portraits, simply match right into a cycle of works. It’s additionally simply the primary of his deliberate tasks that can 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 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 nearly not humanly playable. I wasn’t making an attempt to interrupt the machine, however to push the machine.”
His debut on the Guelph Jazz Pageant was as a one-man present.
“I needed to report it. That was type of an after thought,” he says. “I bought people taking part in with it. It nearly broke the people that performed on the report,” he laughs.
“I’m tremendous happy with it.”
Will there be a live performance efficiency of the total instrumentation?
“Perhaps there’s a spot for it within the live performance corridor,” he speculates. “That’s a enjoyable thought.” A mechanical instrument gives audiences a brand new expertise. “That was in the back of my thoughts — you might have this machine, you could as effectively write strains that folks 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 advanced mechanical road organ on tour is one other matter fully. He’s engaged on a funds and funding for doable 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 effectively.
- 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.
