Friendly Rich - The Birds of Marsville
For his 17th full-length, the multi-faceted Canadian eccentric Richard Marsella, better known as Friendly Rich, unveils what may indeed be his most imaginative and beautiful work to date.
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 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.
"Friendly Rich" Marsella is a composer that originally hails from Brampton, Canada. His sizeable oeuvre wholeheartedly embraces the bizarre, charting the vast expanse between Captain Beefheart and Peewee Herman while traversing themes of childlike wonder, the intersection of goofiness and the sinister, outsiderdom, DIY, and transgression.
Following innumerable releases since 1994 on his own Pumpkin Pie Corporation imprint, in early 2008, Marsella's music was released in Europe by Hazelwood Records, and his band Lollipop People successfully toured there every year since then, playing such festivals as the Fusion Festival in Germany and the Balkan Fever Festival and Danube Festival in Vienna. He has also presented The Lollipop People at several Canadian festivals including Guelph Jazz Festival, Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Halifax Jazz Festival, Newfoundland Music on the Rocks and at the Western Front in Vancouver. Over the years, The Lollipop People have performed alongside noted artists such as Of Montreal, The Tiger Lillies, Amanda Palmer, and Trevor Dunn. Marsella has also collaborated with notables such as Hawksley Workman, Kevin Breit, Nick Fraser, SlowPitchSound, Christine Duncan in performance and on recording. In 2023 he released the LP Man Out Of Time, his first for We Are Busy Bodies.
Marsella's unquenchable artistic curiosity has also led to him producing radio essays and documentaries for CBC Radio One programs Outfront and Definitely Not the Opera, and he was also commissioned by the broadcaster in 2008, yielding his voice and tape work The Ugliest Sound in the World. Other commissions have come from beloved Toronto chamber ensembles Toca Loca and Continuum Contemporary Music, with Marsella also creating an array of concert works that span storyteller and turntable instrumentation to a puppet opera backed by choir, vocal soloists and ensemble.
In addition to helming the Brampton Indie Arts Festival, Marsella also initiated the annual Parade of Noises event which allowed over 700 grade four students the opportunity to celebrate music with their peers as well as over 100 professional musicians from the community at large. The children would all perform on homemade musical instruments and parade through downtown Brampton.
In 2021, Marsella completed his PhD in Music Education from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Lee Bartel. His doctoral research was on musical playgrounds as a vehicle for community development. In addition to his work in the field of music education, Marsella also studied composition under Gary Kulesha, R. Murray Schafer and Alexander Rapaport.
"merges sly wit, phantasmagoric imagery, and understated carnivalesque musicality" — Hal Niedzviecki, Broken Pencil
"Toronto composer and flâneur Friendly Rich (Richard Marsella) has surveyed the work of his predecessors, and evidently finds much delusion in their grandeur. His "butchering" (as he cheerfully describes it) reconfigures Mussorgsky's suite for a mongrel band of reeds, horns, harpsichord, accordion and harp, clustered around an ELP-like rock formation (guitars, drum kit and synthesizer), with toy instruments on deck for select cameos [...] It was about time somebody threw a pie in Mussorgsky's face. He sure knows how to wear it." — Robert Everett-Green, The Globe and Mail
"A comedic provocateur who knows full well that life is a carnival, Rich and his band mine circus jazz, post-punk and the deconstructed rock that Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa once dispatched (8/10)" — Vish Khanna, Exclaim!
