INA GRM and Editions MEGO are pleased to announce the creation of a new collection of releases, the Portraits GRM series. Continuing the fertile collaboration initiated in 2012 with Recollection GRM, the GRM and Editions MEGO have decided to offer a complementary series, no longer focused on the "classic" GRM repertoire but towards recent creations commissioned by the GRM to artists from all horizons. This Portraits GRM series will focus on important and emerging figures of the experimental music scene and will highlight the notion of work rather than album. Many releases in the collection will be contemporary works by two different musicians, each piece taking up the space of one side. Longer works however, will fill an entire record. This new series will come to life with the release of two records, the first devoted to the piece Shutting Down Here by Jim O'Rourke, and the second to the works Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani, and a Fly) by Max Eilbacher and Forma by Lucy Railton. By reaffirming the concept of musical work, the Portraits GRM series seeks to renew with the pioneering work that the GRM Collection series but also the Philips Prospective 21e Siècle collection had achieved so admirably: offer a panorama of current musical experimentations and embrace a more durable scope with works that manage to extract themselves from an increasingly tyrannical and increasingly hazardous present-time. At a time when nothing knows how to "leave a mark", this series aims to address both current listeners, and explorers of the future.
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SPGRM 009LP
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Entirely computer-generated, Jessica Ekomane's "Manifolds" is a work that explores the multiple possibilities of polyphonic writing, extending it to the "multiphonic" universe where sources and timbres diffract themselves in the listening space. The different voices of the composition no longer follow the traditional parallel trajectories of musical dialogue, but find themselves propelled as if into a particle accelerator, a "collider" freed from all formal rhetoric to reach a state of liberation of energies that is truly confounding. It is then that, in the multi-layered universe of sonic electrons, as if against its own will, a "chant" of overwhelming humanity is revealed. Laurel Halo's "Octavia," a piece for piano and electronics, explores the relationship between melodic motifs and textures in a singular way, intermittent moments of melody, harmony and sound materials connecting and disconnecting, to indicate a series of nets or webs, swaying in and out of one another. These sonic nets gently float, spin and merge, and the effect is one of gently floating over an abyss. The work is inspired by the "spiderweb city" of the same name in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: "Below there is nothing for hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; further down you can glimpse the chasm's bed. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long."
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SPGRM 008LP
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"Félicia Atkinson's Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O'Keeffe) is approached as a meditation, not as meditative music, but as a reflection on the art of creation: how to inhabit one's creation, how to convey it, domesticate it and live with it. Drawing inspiration from the artist Georgia O' Keeffe, both in her work as a painter and in the houses in which she lived in New Mexico, and even in the landscapes that surround them, Félicia Atkinson has composed a piece that evokes and celebrates, in a poetic and holistic way, the mystery of art, the somnambulic oscillation that accompanies the act of creating. Blending fragmentary voices, islands of piano, electronic textures and patterns, and field recordings, Félicia Atkinson's music is sincere and inspired, a meditation, then, but also a lesson we sometimes forget: being an artist is not an activity, even less a profession, it's a singular way of approaching the world and, in so doing, densifying it. Richard Chartier's music takes up residence at the frontiers of the audible, on the edge where sound diffracts into an inter-dimensionality where sounds, space, listening and silence recombine in an arborescence of becomings that present themselves to us and then disappear. The space-time in which Richard Chartier's music unfolds is a stretched space-time, barely emerging in the world of sound. The delicacy, precision and accuracy of the composition Recurrence.Expansion lies precisely in this dialogue between a shape that is exposed and developed in an inspired and masterful way, and the sonic biotope in which this shape develops. It is from such an encounter that the singularity of Richard Chartier's music emerges, music of attentive listening, but also sensitive, inhabited music, a music of discreet metamorphosis." --Francois J. Bonnet, Paris, March 2023
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SPGRM 006LP
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Dafne Vicente-Sandoval's "Minos Circuit" is the resonance of a double exploration, that of an instrument, the bassoon -- an instrument dear to Dafne Vicente-Sandoval -- and that of a listening, of a gaze, almost. The first exploration deconstructs the instrument, tearing it apart, reducing it to an archipelago of sound bodies stimulated by an electro-acoustic device that generates feedback and infiltrates each part of the bassoon, in order to carry out a methodical, systematic examination. The second exploration is the inner one of attention and listening, the one that measures, at each moment, the necessity or not of an intervention in the very act of the musical work, of this subtle balance that is established between composition and observation, between action and contemplation.
Lars Petter Hagen's "Transfiguration 4" is both a "meditation on musical ruins" and "a study of the material of Richard Strauss's 'Metamorfosen'". "Transfiguration 4" works on the musical fragment as an expressive and poetic possibility that can be deployed below or beyond simple musical syntax, a syntax that is still too often equated with music itself. What Lars Petter Hagen highlights in this remarkable work is that the power of music lies at its fringes, that is, at the edge of its own disappearance. "Transfiguration 4" floats in a particularly moving way in these troubled lands, where nothing is ever resolved, and where everything, however, is suspended, like a stream of blurred memories that memory would summon to form an intuition. A musical intuition.
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SPGRM 007LP
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"22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream" is a perceptual trap. Inspired by an experience of intense perceptive disorientation while crossing a market in China, Eve Aboulkheir re-instantates, in the field of sounds, the swirling and anamorphic universe of thwarted perceptions, surrounding multitudes and shifted sensations. She thus constructs a dreamlike and artificial universe, suspended and hyperactive, which is both an electronic vortex sucking us in and a mechanical ballet developing its arabesques around us, caught and fascinated by these volutes of sound that fracture like a kaleidoscope in which our eyes-ears are immersed. "22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream" approaches the musical form in the most direct way possible, i.e. through its effects and its empire on our sensorium. "22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream" est un piège à perception.
"How To Avoid Ants": Using concrète techniques to collect, transform and assemble sounds of various origins (sounds of tree branches, leaves, but also guitars or synthesizers), Lasse Marhaug elaborates a dense and subterranean work, which unfolds through the multiple dimensions induced by the great diversity of its sound material. There is a labyrinthine feeling in this work, a feeling that is better understood when the inspiration for the title of the piece "How To Avoid Ants" is revealed, a very practical and then poetic undertaking, that of avoiding the anthills lining the path to the forest camp in the kindergarten to which his little girl, who was then frightened of insects, was going. It is such an activity of circumvention, diversion and byways that Lasse Marhaug uses to create an exploratory and evasive music.
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SPGRM 005LP
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Shelter Press and INA grm are pleased and moved to present two previously unreleased recordings of Peter Rehberg, two live performances given at the GRM which, each in their own way, vividly illustrate the extent of his sonic palette. On July 22, 2021, Peter Rehberg passed away, leaving a great emptiness in his wake. Many initiatives have already celebrated or will soon celebrate his memory and the titanic work he put at the service of so many artists - a whole musical community, in fact -- through Editions Mego. INA grm, Shelter Press and Stephen O'Malley, who are continuing some of the collaborative Editions Mego sub-labels (Recollection GRM, Portraits GRM and Ideologic Organ), wanted to pay tribute more specifically to the musician Peter Rehberg, and to his immense talent. Peter Rehberg, as an artist, has collaborated with the GRM on numerous occasions, both with Stephen O'Malley (as KTL) and solo. This release features two concerts given for the GRM, each time as part of the Présences électronique festival. The first concert, given on March 15, 2009 at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, marked the first collaboration between Peter Rehberg and the GRM and the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship. The second concert took place on March 6, 2016. Between these two concerts, seven years have passed, seven years in which the ties between Peter Rehberg and the GRM have been strengthened, seven years in which Peter Rehberg's music has flourished. What is striking in these two concerts is how Peter Rehberg's unique musical sensitivity and "grammar" can be heard beyond the instruments. For while the first concert is pure laptop music, the second is extended to the field of modular synthesis. However, in both concerts, the elements that are so personal to Peter Rehberg's music are present and combine in a layering of sonic abrasions, raw sensations and a sensitivity that is as much about formal awareness as it is about the invocation of overwhelming emotions, even though a little hidden behind a radicality that is always a bit provocative. Peter Rehberg offers us a "portrait music", a music that gives some clues about the personality of its author and whose absence continues to deepen an inconsolable sadness.
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SPGRM 004CD
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2023 repress. Following her critically acclaimed album The Sacrificial Code (IDEAL 192CD/LP), Swedish-American composer Kali Malone returns with Living Torch on Portraits GRM. Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone's demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone's music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue's ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It's a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone's Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012. Composed and produced by Kali Malone at INA GRM 2020-2021. Trombone and bass clarinet recorded at EMS Elektronmusikstudion 2020. Pre-mastered by Emmanuel Richier at INA GRM. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering. Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin. Personnel: Mats Äleklint - trombone; Isak Hedtjärn - bass clarinet; Kali Malone - ARP 2500, Modular Synthesis, Pura Data, Boîte à Bourdons.
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SPGRM 004LP
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2023 repress! Following her critically acclaimed album The Sacrificial Code (IDEAL 192CD/LP), Swedish-American composer Kali Malone returns with Living Torch on Portraits GRM. Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone's demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone's music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue's ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It's a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone's Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012. Composed and produced by Kali Malone at INA GRM 2020-2021. Trombone and bass clarinet recorded at EMS Elektronmusikstudion 2020. Pre-mastered by Emmanuel Richier at INA GRM. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering. Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin. Personnel: Mats Äleklint - trombone; Isak Hedtjärn - bass clarinet; Kali Malone - ARP 2500, Modular Synthesis, Pura Data, Boîte à Bourdons.
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SPGRM 003LP
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"Statistique Synthétique" (2020) by Hecker is a computer-generated sound with resynthesized situated texture recordings. Statistique Synthétique draws as much from the history of computer sound synthesis as from its latest developments. But well beyond developing simply as a proof of concept, this piece aims to transcend the abstract status of synthetic sound objects and lead them to a properly hallucinatory state, that is to say to a meeting point where the object and perception dissolve into each other, in a sort of transcendental field. Beyond, also, hylomorphism, to reach the world of matter-form fusions, where perception knows how to see "shoulders of hills", as Cézanne wrote. Written and produced by Florian Hecker, 2019-2020. Texture analysis and resynthesis algorithm: Axel Röbel, Analysis/Synthesis Team, IRCAM, Paris. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Location Texture Recordings, using DPA 4060, DPA 4017B, DPA 4021 and DPA 4060 microphones to Sound Devices 702 recorder; except segment 4:31-5:37, recorded by Luke Fowler, April 2019 using Sony M10.
Okkyung Lee's "Teum (the Silvery Slit)" (2019) was performed, recorded, and composed by Okkyung Lee (ASCAP). "Teum (the Silvery Slit)" is, as the title suggests, an overture, an opening to the game of multiplications, fragmentations, duplications. But it is also the opening understood as the void that blossoms between two borders, a break from which escapes a double tension, both the pulling force of these two edges which move apart and the opposite force of reconciliation, of compression. Okkyung Lee invites us to a truly telluric moment, a rare moment of expression where tectonic movements and shear stresses become music. If the earthquakes were, as we thought in the 18th century, due to underground thunderstorms, there is no doubt that this piece of music, both celestial and continental, could have been their audible manifestation. Mixed by Lasse Marhaug; Mastered by Guuseppe Ielasi. Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
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SPGRM 001LP
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Repressed. Shutting Down Here is a special work. Symbolically, it covers a period of thirty years, between two visits by Jim O'Rourke to the GRM, the first, as a young man fascinated by the institution and his repertoire, the second, as an accomplished musician, influential and imbued with an aura of mystery. Shutting Down Here is a piece shaped like a universe, a heterogeneous world in which collides the multiple musical facets of Jim O'Rourke: instrumental writing, field recordings, electronic textures, and cybernetic becomings, dynamic spaces, harmonic spaces, silent spans. This variety of approach, strangely, does not in any way weaken the coherence of the whole and this is the talent of Jim O'Rourke, a talent, properly speaking, of composition, where all the sound elements compete and participate to stakes that exceed them and of a common destiny, that is to say of an apparition. Due to the wide dynamic levels, please adjust your volume accordingly.
Released in association with Editions Mego. Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier. Executive Production: Peter Rehberg. Recorded at INA GRM and Steamroom. Personnel: Eiko Ishibashi - piano; Atsuko Hatano - violin, viola; Eivind Lonning - trumpet. Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, February 2020. Photo by Eiko Ishibashi. Sleeve design by Stephen O'Malley.
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SPGRM 002LP
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"Forma" by Lucy Railton is a work that burrows deep inside. It disorientates and teases, without malice. Its beauty lies in gentle projections, which, though subtle, leave deep impressions, like the wings of a nocturnal moth reflecting dark light. Its path, too, is unpredictable, but such disorientation is not a reflection of chaos. Instead, a mysterious intention appears through an imperious unfolding -- its logic escapes us, but nevertheless captivates us. It is the story of a becoming of forms, as well as of their fading away and their appearance as a disappearance. "Forma", for multichannel tape and live cello. Commissioned by INA GRM and first performed on the Acousmonium at INA GRM's Multiphonies Concert Series, Maison de la Radio, Paris on June 1st 2019. Cello recorded live in concert, performed by Lucy Railton. Serge Synthesiser recorded at GRM Studios in April 2019. Organ recorded in Skálholt Cathedral, Iceland, by Alex Bonney, performed by Kit Downes in 2017. All other materials recorded, mixed and created by Lucy Railton at GRM Studios and in her Berlin studio between November 2018 and May 2019. Mix by Lucy Railton/Premaster by Emmanuel Richier (GRM). Photo by George Nebieridze. Part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
"Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly)", by Max Eilbacher, is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher's work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one. Created and recorded November 2018-March 2019 in Baltimore, Maryland. Fly recording made September 2018 in Carrières-sous-Poissy, France. Made for the Présences électronique festival 2019 in Paris, France. Mixed from 8 channel to stereo August 2019. Flute by Ka Baird; Text by Max Eilbacher, text read by Alexander Moskos and Miriam Salaymeh. Photo by Didier Allard © INA.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cut by Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, February 2020. Sleeve design by Stephen O'Malley, Released in association with Editions Mego. Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier. Executive Production: Peter Rehberg.
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