{"product_id":"presque_rien_no1_societe_ii","title":"Presque Rien No.1 \/ Société II","description":"\u003cp\u003ePresque Rien No. 1 \/ Société II is an album by French composer and electroacoustic pioneer Luc Ferrari, originally released in 1970 on Deutsche Grammophon as part of the label's celebrated Avant-Garde LP series, and reissued on May 1, 2026 as the inaugural release of Deutsche Grammophon's new vinyl Avantgarde series — a limited, numbered pressing on 180-gram vinyl, mastered and cut from the original analogue quarter-inch two-track master tapes by Rainer Maillard and Sidney Claire Meyer at the Emil Berliner Studios, with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey. The album pairs two radically different works that together illuminate the remarkable breadth of Ferrari's creative approach: the 21-minute Presque Rien No. 1 \"Lever du Jour au Bord de la Mer\" (1967–1970) and the 27-minute Société II \"Et si le Piano était un Corps de Femme\" (1967), the latter performed by pianist Gérard Frémy, percussionists Gaston Sylvestre, Jean-Pierre Drouet, and Sylvio Gualda, and the Ensemble Instrumental de Musique Contemporaine de Paris conducted by Konstantin Simonovitch.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePresque Rien No. 1 — \"Almost Nothing\" — is now recognized as one of the founding documents of acoustic ecology, field recording art, and sound art more broadly. Begun during the summer of 1967 in a Croatian fishing village, Ferrari captured a full day's worth of environmental sounds at dawn by the sea and, through minimal editing rather than electronic transformation, distilled them into a 21-minute piece that presents unmanipulated ambient sound as complete musical material. Wikipedia notes it has been understood as an affirmation of John Cage's proposition that music is always already happening around us — a landmark of sonic minimalism that influenced generations of experimental artists. Société II, by contrast, is a work of charged political theatre, composed in the ferment preceding the May 1968 upheavals: for piano, three percussionists, and 16 instruments, it stages what Ferrari described as a \"caricature of a macho society,\" in which the four soloists vie for dominance over the piano's body in a feminist allegory that Soundohm describes as making \"clear nods to Ferrari's deep sympathies with the idiom of free jazz\" while remaining \"one of the most remarkable compositions of his career.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Record Store","offers":[{"title":"Vinyl \/ Album","offer_id":53524787003706,"sku":"38053","price":58.99,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/2041\/0682\/files\/Screenshot_2026-05-27_at_2.06.37_PM_df5e0445-cc9a-4c08-9034-9a87a2a094c4.jpeg?v=1782892929","url":"https:\/\/recordstore.ca\/products\/presque_rien_no1_societe_ii","provider":"Record Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}