Lionel Marchetti is a musique concrète composer born in Marseille (France) in 1967. Self-taught at first, he later explored the musique concrète repertoire as acousmatic art withXavier Garcia.

Live, he performs his concrète compositions on various sound spatialization systems (acousmoniums with 4, 8, 12 or more loudspeakers). He mostly composes in his own studio. He also composed at CFMI — Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France) and at Groupe de recherches musicales (Ina-GRM) in Paris (France).

Lionel Marchetti also practices improvisation on stage on his own (experimental analogue devices with various microphones, feedback, radio waves, magnetic tape recorder, modified speakers, analogue synthesizers…) and with musicians like Jérôme Noetinger (electronics, magnetic tape recorder), Xavier Garcia (electronics), Seijiro Murayama, Xavier Charles, Emmanuel Holterbach, and Yan Jun, as well as with Japanese musician and dancer Yôko Higashi.

Since the late 1980s, and in keeping with early musique concrète works, he has been working on a daily basis, in what he calls his sounds workshop, on a form of musical poeticism made possible solely by the use of technologies, ie the loudspeaker associated with recording: from analogue to digital and to the notion of sharing.

As a sound artist with visual arts leanings, he works on audiovisual installations that put loudspeakers on display — as “invisible extensions” — with photographs and various materials.

In parallel, Lionel Marchetti writes poetry and does theoretical research on musique concrète and the art of the loudspeaker, as an artist of the genre with a sensibility and a poetic reading of this approach to making music with recorded sounds.

[English translation: François Couture, i-17]