
Brampton native and eclectic musician and composer Friendly Rich Marsella is about to release his 17th album titled The Birds of Marsville. It will be the second release for indie label We Are Busy Bodies, and will be available in both physical and digital download form on August 15.
The premise of the album is this: a kind of field guide to birds of the town of Marsville in musical and artistic form. The primary instrument is a mechanical street organ, fashioned by Henk Degraauw.
The twist — Marsville is a fictional town, full of fictional but fascinating birds.
Friendly Rich Marsella is a unique figure in the Toronto area music ecosystem. He’s been active as a performing and recording artist since the mid 1990s, producing 17 albums — including the current one — in a variety of genres that include punk-vaudeville fusion, and what he calls a “wayward”, yet complete, rendition of Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition.
We asked him about The Birds of Marsville.
The Birds of Marsville
An 18th-century Hungo-Italian anthropologist and field researcher by the name of C. Smalloochi creates bird songs from the unique species found on the lost island of Marsville.
That’s the fiction. The reality is that the field guide is a collaboration between Marsella and multidisciplinary artist David C. Hannan that, along with the music, features pantings of birds like The Honker, The Bum Bum, and The School Shooters.
Musically, the album offers microtonality, influences of artists like Harry Partch and Ennio Morricone, and more, blended in and out of each other with a carnivalesque sensibility. The music premiered live at the 2021 Guelph Jazz Festival.
Composed and produced by Marsella, the album features a roster of top tier Toronto musicians that includes, in addition to multi-instrumentalist Marsella, Gregory Oh on piano and organ, Nichol S. Robertson on electric guitar, Ed Reifel on orchestral percussion, and Tom Richards on trombone and tuba.
It’s an interesting orchestral mix made even more interesting by one of Marsella’s instruments — and an acknowledged “obsession”.
Friendly Rich Marsella
Along with his recording career, Marsella has also composed music for the Tom Green Show, and toured through both North America and Europe with his band Lollipop People, performing at Fusion Festival in Germany, the Balkan Fever Festival and Danube Festival in Vienna, among others. Lollipop People has performed at Canadian festivals, including Guelph Jazz Festival, Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, Halifax Jazz Festival, Newfoundland Music on the Rocks and at the Western Front in Vancouver.
He founded and ran the Brampton Indie Arts Festival for several years. Marsella has produced radio essays and documentaries for CBC Radio One, and his work has been commissioned by ensembles such as Toca Loca and Continuum Contemporary Music.
Marsella completed his PhD in Music Education from the University of Toronto in 2021, and his doctoral research was on musical playgrounds as a vehicle for community development. Marsella also studied composition under Gary Kulesha, R. Murray Schafer and Alexander Rapaport.

Friendly Rich Marsella: The Interview
“Basically, I’ve been into mechanical street organs for a good 15, 20 years,” Rich begins. Henk Degraauw, 88, is a friend who’s also based in Brampton. “He built this mechanical street organ, and a few years back, he gifted it to me.”
Marsella describes it as midi driven, and featuring more than 100 pipes. “This guy can make an accordion play without a human behind it,” he says. “I’ve gotta start writing for this thing. It’s too beautiful a piece of art.” It was his first reaction. “It just sounds so magical.”
When it came to repertoire, though, Henk was surprised. The usual music for the instrument falls into the beer barrel polka category. Rich was composing contemporary music.
“I played the piece for him, and he almost fell over,” he says.
The Album
“I’ve always wanted to start working on a larger project that’s a series of different pieces,” Marsella says.
The suite, which includes 76 fictional bird portraits, easily fit into a cycle of works. It’s also just the first of his planned projects that will involve the lost island of Marsville.
“This is just one of the [works] I’m doing for this imaginary island.”
The name is composed of a compilation of his name and his wife’s last name, and it resembles nowhere on earth in particular. “It’s all in my head,” he says. “I thought it was an open ended concept enough to allow for future [experiments].”
The Music
“I was really inspired by Conlan Nancarrow,” he says. “All his player piano music really inspired me — writing music that’s almost not humanly playable. I wasn’t trying to break the machine, but to push the machine.”
His debut at the Guelph Jazz Festival was as a one-man show.
“I wanted to record it. That was kind of an after thought,” he says. “I got humans playing with it. It almost broke the humans that played on the record,” he laughs.
“I’m super proud of it.”
Will there be a concert performance of the full instrumentation?
“Maybe there’s a place for it in the concert hall,” he speculates. “That’s a fun thought.” A mechanical instrument offers audiences a new experience. “That was at the back of my mind — you have this machine, you may as well write lines that people can’t play.”
He credits the musicians for their virtuosity. “They’re some of the heaviest hitters I know.”
Of course, bringing the complex mechanical street organ on tour is another matter entirely. He’s working on a budget and funding for possible festival appearances in 2026.
“It’s a hard thing to lug around. The budget behind the whole thing is real,” he notes. The recording is intended to work as a stand alone experience as well.
- Find details about the recording, and stream or buy it, [HERE].
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