When musique concrète first hit the airwaves, listeners reached for their earplugs. This strange genre didn’t sound like music at all! It ignored melody and meter. It didn’t even use instruments. Instead, musique concrète took recorded sound as its raw material. That could be anything from trundling trains to clattering saucepans. Using audio tape and phonograph records, composers manipulated these sounds, reassembling them into abstract works that felt like they came from an alien world.

While this weird genre was never a popular hit, it opened up a whole new vocabulary of studio techniques, influencing everyone from Frank Zappa to The Who. Its impact even spread as far as The Beatles, inspiring their eight-and-a-half-minute musique concrète extravaganza ‘Revolution 9’.

In this book, author Christian Kriticos traces the beguiling history of musique concrète, from the 1940s into the 21st century, focusing on the eccentric characters who spearheaded the genre. He shows how these maverick composers anticipated techniques used in hip-hop, mashups, plunderphonics and ambient music. In this way, he argues that the influence of musique concrète can still be heard everywhere, even if you’ve never stopped to listen for it…