The Concert staged by Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)

As an affiliation of L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel (National Institute of Audio-visual Documentation), GRM is not only a pioneering organization that aims at exploring electronic music and concrete music but also a specialized institution that focuses on the research of experimental sound.

In collaboration with GRM’s director Daniel Teruggi, the Digital Art Center Taipei (hereafter referred to as DAC) invites GRM’s iconic experimental music composers to present their magna opuses at 2015 Digital Art Festival Taipei.

Program

Artwork Introduction

Diego Losa Horizons ou le regard du voyageur (Horizons or the gaze of the traveller) 2015 17

Kilometres, fields, towns,
Everything seems so distant, behind this window…

The clarity of this Sunday blinds me, dazzles me, calms me.
I'm leaving the mountains, and now can see the plain

Everything is going so fast from this window
Moving, living, changing of hemisphere, creating, believing
Everything is magical out of this window

Ancient landscapes, a man walking along a trail,
Quiet, alone

The road becomes water, the field becomes sky, and me,
sits here, contemplating the infinity

Season changing

Everything seems so unreal behind this window!

François Bayle Mimaméta 1989 11’

If ‘meta’ means after, or beyond, or around, or in the distance, this still only partially informs us. Either concerning the perhaps-surprising choice of harmonies which are ‘ranked’ but whose inner light and spectral grain provoke a diverging perception. Or concerning the unfolding of a central melisma resembling smoke rising and endlessly growing fainter. And this ‘mi’ may well be the beginning of ‘micro’, while ‘ma’ could refer to ‘macro’, two categories known for being irreconcilably symmetrical.

Daniel Teruggi Springtime 16' 2013

Commissioned by the ZKM, Karlsruhe for the Klangdom

Springtime is a trip in our heads, a closed space where we wander around without really looking for anything but hoping to make many discoveries. Among them there is Spring who may spring and bring us different perfumes, sensations and expectations.

My own voice appears here, being a part of the trip, however changing its form when approaching different realms. Space is always circular and surrounds the listener through movement and precise location of the sound sources.

Daniel Teruggi Spaces of Mind 17’ 2004

Every being has its own perception of Space; it is an open concept, with different meanings for different situations. Physics, Astronomy, Poetry or every-day life, give their own interpretation of the word and apply it with different laws and meanings. So, to give a definition is quite a difficult task, but one may say that Space is something around us that may or may not have boundaries and in which we move and act as well as other objects. It is also very tightly related to time, in which we move also, but only in one sense, which gives sense to our perception of space.

Sound also conveys a Space. Either real or virtual, the fact of listening to a Sound produced by an unseen source (the essence of Acousmatics) produces a Space perception. There are concert halls, with dozens of loud-speakers, that bring music to life and create spatial unwanted effects like reverberation, sound absorption, echoes, black and bright holes, which strongly complicate the task of listening. However, if one wants to bring many people together to listen to the same work at the same time (which is what we call a concert), then you have to go through this complicated situation for which a complex loud-speaker array will highly help.

Bernard Parmegiani Capture éphémère 12’ 1968

This work is a milestone in the work of Parmegiani and a milestone in the production of the GRM. It differs from previous productions by the extremely complex and varied manipulations that Parmegiani invents and develops. The editing is particularly tight; some sequences link together on very short blasts, separated only by a few centimeters of tape, creating for our hearing contrasting events of intense energy. The sound transformatio work is also original: no inital material is identifiable after handling, and it seems as if Parmegiani needed in order to achieve a result as mastered in every detail, to achieve the "fission" of the original materials to create a new sound mater, accurate, perfectly calibrated and adapted to its purpose.

The range of sound transformations is huge; Parmegiani not only transforms the material and makes with it a kind of "lace montage", but he also multiplies certain sequences with accelerated reading, with filtering and mixing ... and this overall treatment produces extremely diverse results: such as a sequence of micro-events, accelerated, will become grainy sound material. Moreover it is the artificial resonance of a phenomenon (obtained in the echo chamber) that will continue, then "sculpt" in music in its evolution.