Passades Volume 1

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Charlotte Corday And The Lament Of Louis XVI (1989)
Passades – Volume I (2002/3)

“Before I left Ireland for the studios at Bourges I sampled a selection of short drum rolls and patterns in my own studio in Dublin. By playing chords of these samples on the keyboard and adding sampled pipes and trumpets I created an imaginary parade passing through the streets of Paris (Louis XVI on his way to the guillotine). The pipes melody The Lament of Louis XVI, a song from the period. I then asked my eleven year old son Paavo to sing this song for me. The words are: O my people what is it I’ve done / I loved truth I loved justice / Your happiness is all that mattered to me / And now you’re dragging me to my death.

I also asked the actress Olwen Fouere, who had played the part of Charlotte Corday in Peter Weiss’ “Marat/Sade” unforgettably in Dublin years earlier, to read parts of the story of Charlotte Corday — some written by herself and some compiled from Corday letters. She also experimented with her voice and sang a verse from a song of the period about Corday murdering Marat in his bath. Charlotte Corday was guillotined for this.

In Bourges I used a DMX 1000 for the electronic sounds and a vocoder for the vocal transformations (the actual sound of the voice through the vocoder was as important to me as any meaning in the text). A lot of mixing and editing followed. At the end of this composition the ghost of the revolution (in the form of a horse-drawn carriage) passes through the streets of modern Paris.”