Monday September 11 * doors at 630, music at 7 * in the backyard * TICKETS

Secret Planet presents...

The 12 piece Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp has scoured the stages of Europe to demonstrate that the formula "the more the merrier" has never been more true than on stage. Whether in prestigious festivals (Paléo Festival de Nyon, Fusion Festival, Incubate, Womad, Bad Bonn Kilbi, Jazz à la Vilette) or on the four albums released since its launch, the group shows an incredible fluidity. The Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp (a mischievous title in homage to traditional African groups -- Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono n°1, Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrytmo etc... -- and to one of the greatest dynamizers of 20th century art) embraces the forms of its musicians while pushing them to their limits. The result is a powerful, experimental, unstable and terribly alive, organic sound. Mixing free jazz, post punk, high life, brass band, symphonic mixtures and kraut rock, their sound only goes beyond the limits of genre. Transcendental, almost ritualistic, the music is coupled with powerful lyrics, declaimed in rage against a world that is falling apart. Adorcist, hypnotic and post-syncratic, the Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, far from Tzara's manifesto, is somewhere between Hugo Ball's phonetic psalms, a Sufi procession that turns into a brawl and a voodoo ritual, but always with a precision proper to the monomania of an Asperger.

Teething Veils began in 2006 in Washington, DC, playing very occasional live shows at places such as the Montgomery College Planetarium and their own living room at 611 Florida Ave, becoming more active about five years later. They have released five LPs (Velorio, 2013; Constellations, 2014; Sea and Sun, 2017; Canopy of Crimson, 2020; and To Have and to Hold, 2022) and a 7” single (Dinner Date, 2015) through the artist-run DC-and-Santa-Fe-based collective Etxe Records. They have played for audiences in 45 US states plus the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces. 

"These little songs—sepia-toned yet searching, eccentric yet melodically inclined—add up to something that feels like its own pocket universe, sometimes wistful, sometimes the kind of menacing only achieved via a late-career Tom Waits death rattle." – Washington City Paper

“If the latest from this self-described chamber-folk outfit feels funereal, it isn’t just because bandleader Greg Svitil sings like a eulogist. It’s because funerals allow emotions to be purged and smothered, making time feel stranger than slow.” – Chris Richards, Washington Post

Secret Planet is an independent concert series in Washington DC by Electric Cowbell Productions presented in a variety of venues across the city. Artists come from close and afar. From countries and neighborhoods where English is not always understood and their culture is not always represented on the US stage. However, whatever their geographical origin, all Secret Planet artists tend to follow their own vision and not be held back by genre, rules, language, commercial appeal or concerns of authenticity. They all have in common a creative impulse never impeded by stylistic or geographical boundaries.