Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp
Collective rhythmic dadaism
Founded in Geneva in 2006 – at the initiative of double bass player and cultural activist Vincent Bertholet – the Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp is a musical collective of variable geometry comprising between ten and fourteen instrumentalists engaged in an original crossover of free jazz, post-punk, experimental music, West African grooves, minimalistic approaches, progressive virtuosity, brass band sound and symphonic accents. A superimposing of the poetical and the esthetical that may seem incredible, but is somehow already contained in the group’s disorienting name which simultaneously references one of the most conceptual western artists and the pompous epithets of orchestras from Congo to Benin. The OTPMD is the acoustic transposition of a multicultural Geneva, young, ironic, slightly bohemian, but politically committed.
Over the course of five album releases, the last of which “We’re Okay. But we’re lost anyway” in 2021, it has managed to successfully carry across Europe an image of Swiss music that few would have expected. The OTPMD is “the story of an orchestra without a chamber, of a sensitive battalion with unlimited generosity, of a wild form that has never needed a director to tame its own imagination and determination”.
