Marc Ducret Palm Sweat: Marc Ducret Plays The Music Of Tim Berne

The material Tim had been sending me was sometimes a piece we had played, often a mere sketch or a short musical idea…we had performed a couple of them together, but most of what I chose to record was new to me. During the year 2021, sound engineer Pierre-Henri Thiébaut and I spent three weeks recording and mixing at my place; we also went to a studio nearby to record some acoustic guitars and percussion, and the horns, cello and voices were recorded by Antonin Rayon in his studio.

I had already recorded three solo albums, and also played some of Tim’s music as solo pieces on his album 'The Sevens' and I wanted to take the concept somewhere else. Recording at home gave me the opportunity to choose the format, instrumentation and colors required by each piece, but moreover, I sought to present Tim’s music which has meant so much for me in the past thirty years in various lights and shades: there are numerous echoes in Palm Sweat, from the vague memory of Hemphill’s 'Dogon A.D.' at the beginning of the opening track to an allusion to the piece 'Sci-Fi,' as well as Tim’s voice which can be heard -somewhat distorted – at one point.

I chose to “unfold” Tim’s compositions in my own way, at times stretching a melodic line into a series of pitches and dynamics, often using canons, inversions and retrograde melodies to enrich the given structure or create new ones, and sometimes adding chords to a melody or extracting a rhythmic cell to use it as a starting point for other developments. I was mainly concerned with the shape of the album, trying to provide a sort of musical landscape in which the listener could wander – that is why there is very little solo or improvisation on a form; instead of a linear shape I tried to put emphasis on color, texture and development.