Artist: Alain de Filippis Title: "Petites Musiques de Bruits" Catalog #: GF013 Series: II Total Time: 59'05" Release Date: March, 2001

Track 1 - Le La (accordage de l'orchestre) .......... 5'46"
Track 2 - La Grande Ouverture (Agitato) .......... 4'53"
Track 3 - Kling-Klang (etude aux Gamelles en 2 mouvements) .......... 5'05"
Track 4 - Globaloo .......... 3'08"
Track 5 - Toka Tameka (musique de machines) .......... 10'18"
Track 6 - Pfffff .......... 1'14"
Track 7 - Massaclou (suite megaphonique en 3 mouvements) .......... 10'23"
Track 8 - Tohu-Bohu (cinema pour l'oreille) .......... 1'46"
Track 9 - Bic Nip (Rabalacave) .......... 4'38"
Track 10 - Illico-Presto .......... 8'28"
Track 11 - Fermeture-Eclair (point final) .......... 41"

Dan Warburton - Paris Transatlantic

"Petites Musiques de Bruits" puns on the French translation of Mozart's warhorse "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik", though Wolfgang isn't one of the composers whose music gets ripped apart by Alain de Filippis' sampler.
We get Berlioz though (the "Dies Irae" from the "Symphonie Fantastique" turns into a whoopee cushion) and Stravinsky (significantly the "Symphony in Three Movements", whose motivic writing anticipates the cut'n'paste of sampling forty years later), and many others, in an anarchic kitchen-sink debunking of both the classical orchestral repertoire and vintage musique concrète, Pierre Henry's pompous "Futuristie" remixed by a circus clown in a home studio.

Jim Haynes - The Wire

This might be an academic study of a Duchampian approach to sound construction, but De Filippis contextualizes the 'readymade' - in this case the sampled fragment - as a subversive agent set against the institutional canons of the ivory tower. He liberally samples from various 19th and 20th century orchestral compositions, and then transposes, overlaps and reverses the jarring fragments within a mangled collage of repeating loops. The album is soaked with a black humour and rhythmic sensibility rarely found in De Fillipi's musique concrete and electroacoustic brethren.
Yet as he has issued this subversive tract from a position within the ivory tower, he may well be oblivious to the fact that he has arrived at the same conclusion that Clint Ruin and Laibach came to more than a decade ago, under more abject circumstances.

Manifold Records

Tiny music? Tiny places? Tiny things and small ideas. Heres a petite but grand assemblage of mixed-media sounds, voices, music and charming hijinks. Think People Like Us but without so much actual music. Its more like a river filled with TVs and radios, bobbing up and down, volumes down low, all on different stations. A crowd of people have gathered on both banks to comment. The sample will tell you a lot more than any words we could write!

François Couture -All-Music Guide website

An English translation of the title of Alain De Filippis CD must include the Mozart pun. Therefore the best formula would be "A Little Noise Music." It is a programmatic title: the music heard on Petites Musiques de Bruits come from classical music and musique concrète records. The dedication to the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Edgar Varèse, Erik Satie, Pierre Henry, and Frank Zappa gives an indication on the snippets origins.
De Filippis collages take various forms: rip-off orchestras, sub-techno, even musique concrète itself (yes, on "Tohu-Bohu" he seems to be sampling a genre to create a piece that sticks to that genre). On this CD the technique pioneered by Christian Marclay takes an unusual form: instead of focusing on popular music or kitsch (Stock, Hausen & Walkman's Hammond-a-gogo sound sources on Organ Transplants; Martin Tétreault's cheesy cha-cha-cha LPs on "Des Pas, Des Mois", we hear so-called serious works -- but trying to identify them won't take you very far.
Sampling orchestras is harder than using a square pop beat : the envelope and decay are not the same. De Filippis does a great job, technique-wise and esthetic-wise. These pieces range from strangely ethereal landscapes ("Illico-Presto") to silly symphonic cut-and-paste, as in "La Grande Ouverture," one of the CD's two highlights.
The other one is "Toka Tameka" in which the artist transforms the orchestra into a machine by locking it into mechanical repetitions -- one immediately sees the link between that and Zappa's "enforced recreational facility" for orchestra players in the movie 200 Motels. Highly entertaining and heartily recommended.

Solenoïde / Radio-Aligre

Petit avertissement à présent à tous les solénautes allergiques aux programmes d'attraction musicale en play-back. Une écoute prolongée de ce disque pourrait provoquer chez ces sujets de graves lésions psycho-auditives.
Les adeptes de tout-terrain sonique vont être quant à eux servis...
Avec cet album, Alain De Filippis cultive un plancton sonore insaisissable et polymorphe dont les spécialistes de mutagénèse sonore vont se délecter. Ici le futile cotoie le grave, le drôle précède l'angoissant dans une farandole de figures et de sons décalés.Vous l'aurez compris, nous voilà encore en présence d'une oeuvre évocatrice destinée à stimuler l'imaginaire radiovisuel !

Sans hésiter, nous décernons une palme solénoïdale à ce grand du cinéma français pour l'oreille.