Since the mid 1990’s, Marsella has produced a varied and playful catalogue spanning punkish vaudeville songs laced with off-colour jokes to a complete (and utterly wayward) rendition of Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition. Along the way, he composed music for three seasons of the Tom Green Show, toured North America and Europe, and founded the Brampton Indie Arts Festival, an annual event that during his curatorial tenure featured legendary artists such as Nash the Slash, Marc Ribot, Nihilist Spasm Band, Ron Sexsmith, and John Oswald.
The Birds of Marsville, his second release for endlessly eclectic Toronto label We Are Busy Bodies, retains Marsella’s perverse sense of humour while affirming just how far his singular vision stretches. At the centre of this new music is the orchestrion, a mechanical street organ, that was hand-built by Henk Degraauw. The instrument’s distinctive carnivalesque sonority is flanked by a wide assortment of other instrumentation yet it remains the focal point of the album’s peculiar soundworld.
This composition is purportedly based on an 18th-century field guide by researcher C. Smalloochi, and apparently employs bird song from species found on the lost island of Marsville. Of course, a cursory glance at the book in question reveals that this is pure fiction, and in fact said guid is a collaboration between Marsella and multidisciplinary artist David C. Hannan with paintings of cheekily named birds like The Honker, The Bum Bum, and The School Shooters. Birds of Marsville was originally premiered in outdoor shows at the 2021 Guelph Jazz Festival and these performances also featured Hannan’s images prominently, imbuing it with a homespun theatricality.
Yet without these performative and visual aspects, the recording takes on a different character. Its two outlandish suites of strung-together instrumental vignettes unfurl a mesmerizing intricacy where crisp exactitude is juxtaposed with raucous, psychedelic bedlam. Its overall sound and spirit may skew cartoonish but its surface novelty is anchored in genuine strangeness just as its blistering complexity emerges from total lucidity. Birds of Marsville proposes a unique stylistic amalgam that variously alludes to the vertiginous rhythms of prog’s outer reaches, the microtonality and episodic structures of Harry Partch, Ennio Morricone at his sleaziest and most experimental, and the unsettling impishness of early Residents.
This is downright relentless music, both in terms of its actual pacing and the fact that the listener is continually confronting its motley bouquet of instrumentation, yet Marsella packs the work with so much beautiful coloristic interplay and elegant hairpin turns that one never tires of its frantic fairground flourishes. And though it delights in its own oddity, the work feels cohesive and carefully constructed, allowing it to exude a certain cock-eyed charisma.
This record may veer sharply away from Friendly Rich’s more blatantly humorous song-based output, yet its surreal and unclassifiable journey is sure to win over new fans.