condition (disc/cover): NM / NM - Messe Pour Le Temps Présent / Le Voyage on Philips brings together two landmark works by Pierre Henry on a single CD, the first composed with Michel Colombier, the second a solo journey into Tibetan eschatology. The pairing seems incongruous until you recognize the thread: both concern bodies in transformation, consciousness in transit between states.
The Messe Pour Le Temps Présent emerged from collaboration with choreographer Maurice Béjart, who needed music that could make dancers move in ways classical scores couldn't provoke. Colombier brought his background in jazz and pop arrangement, a rhythmic fluency that Henry's purely electroacoustic work sometimes lacked. "Psyché Rock" became the unlikely centerpiece, a track that escaped the ballet to haunt film soundtracks and sample banks for decades. Fatboy Slim would later build "Right Here, Right Now" from its bones.
Le Voyage travels in opposite direction: inward, downward, through the bardos described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Where the Mass celebrates embodiment, the Voyage prepares for its dissolution. Henry constructs acoustic corridors leading somewhere no microphone can follow. The CD format allows both works complete, uninterrupted, the festive and the funereal separated only by the pause between tracks.
