Charles Duvelle

Charles Duvelle and his instrument
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Earlier paintings of Charles Duvelle featured him as an old man, here he is in his prime in the 1970s working on field recordings that became his legacy. He considered himself a "westerner with a microphone" and this painting shows just that. The track he recorded that is in the top 100 is, like last year, is Wama Igini Kamu recorded in Papua New Guinea. The track comes in at #2 and appears on The Photographs of Charles Duvelle (Sublime Frequencies, 2017.) Charles Duvelle (1937-2017) was a French ethnomusicologist and composer. For a time he was associated with the record label Disques Ocora, founded by the founder of Musique Concrète Pierre Schaeffer. It is to Duvelle to whom Ocora owns its sterling reputation. [Sublime Frequencies] For Ocora Duvelle recorded the music found on the cd-set mentioned above, including Wama Igini Kamu. Duvelle rejected neocolonialism and while at Ocora put forward an effort to decolonialize the recording industry and setting up—mainly in Africa—local systems for the production and distribution of music.