Pierre Henry – Mouvement-Rythme-Étude

BTW - according to the booklet this opus was composed sometime between 1963 and 1967. That's around the same time as he created other great works like Le Voyage and the famous "jerks electroniques" psychedelic rock works. Way ahead of his time, this extremely obscure work was a huge surprise when it came out on CD from Mantra. As with a lot of Pierre Henry works it seems the given composition date means when the work was completed and/or first performed, not when it was composed, which would no doubt have taken a long time during this extremely busy period of his work.

What's more this CD is an extended version.
The CD includes the following extra tracks, not on the original LP release:
1 Battements 4:12
2 Positions 3:12
10 Variations 2:26
12 Tours 2:38
14 Variance D'Exercice 2:24
17 Manèges 3:02
18 Enchaînements 1:37

This piece of work should be absolutely re-discovered by the actual young electronica/braindance crowd, for it has all the same qualities you could expect from an Autechre or Pansonic record, but with really much more mastery and an higher sense of construction and drama.
This date back from 1970, and it's obvious that it sound today as fresh and innovative than in the day of its première.
Pierre Henry has created here what would later be called electronica : weird minimal beats liberated out of groove and evolving through a life of their own, twisting around, rejuvenating themselves at each turn, and never giving the listener the opportunity to be lost or bored by these abstracted figures.
The sense of focus is incredible : it has a freshness and an immediacy that you could seek for a long time in most of the self-pretentious work of electronic/post-techno superstars.
This is not a conceptual work, this is music to live with.
Pierre Henry doesn't look here for a mere anti-rythmical posture, but rather he felt here the need to explore the arrythmic possibilities of rythm in its own right.