Henri Chopin Biography
Henri Chopin was born in Paris in 1922. During his lifetime, he became known as a tightrope walker of the multitrack tape recorder and multiplier of voices. He was able to create bodily sounds and amplify the microacoustic universe, transferring chromatic values to them via an enormous sound kaleidoscope. Chopin began to be interested in poetry in 1955, when he found himself working as an educator for misfit children on the Isle of Ré. Here he meets a street vendor who offers him a small portable tape recorder, which represents a turning point for his career.
The poet finds his voice interesting but not his lyrics, so he decides to opt for pure vocality, and in his past he had already made precise choices in the literary field. In '52, in fact, on the eve of his departure for the Indochina war, he took a bag, stuffed into it all the poems written up to then, took it to the banks of the Seine and set it on fire. That is considered by Chopin to be his first true poetic act. He said that at 14 years old, when he lived on the outskirts of Paris, practically the countryside at the time, he was fascinated by the clamor of peasant and proletarian festivals. Chopin was co-opted for compulsory labor in 1942 and in 1943 he was deported by the Germans to Olomuk in Czechoslovakia. Subsequently, he is sent to East Prussia and the Baltic, where he finds himself on the "death march" towards Russia. Upon returning home, he learns that his brothers Francis and Pierre are missing, that his half-brother Jean is in prison and finds his mother shocked by the events.
During the years of experimentation, Chopin assimilated the experience of the historical avant-gardes and laid the foundations for research into the new era of electronics. In 1959 he founded the magazine Cinquième Saison, which in '64 became OU, a publication containing texts, images and sound materials on vinyl. Chopin, intrepid and refined precursor of the times, did not limit himself to cultivating the creative sphere of sound poetry. A key figure of the French avant-garde, and later internationally appreciated, he is also a visual artist, graphic designer, typographer, performer, director, publisher and independent artistic promoter. Chopin remains an important point of reference for several generations of artists both in terms of the poetry of sound and that of the poetry of images.
