CD 3 is called Le son en nombres. With this disk we reach the flourishing 1980s, with digital recordings and ever more sophisticated equipment, which for some dilettantes made the discrimination that lies at the base of all fine art much harder, revealing that extravagant tools couldn’t guarantee better end results, unless the good old talent was present – but this had no bearing on the GRM, where talent has always been the heart of the matter – and that good measure of poetry and imagination, which nowhere flows mightier than in France.

Yann Geslin provides a long, rambling and extremely interesting account of how the GRM evolved into the digital domain; a feat not easily accomplished at the meager beginning.
François Bayle was the first artist to put the emerging technology to use, at great pains.
Bayle’s Eros Bleu from 1979 is the first work created through the new technology. It’s t he first piece on CD 3 in GRM’s fantastic 5-CD box of material from 1948 until today.
The sounds come bouncing at you like light bending around celestial bodies; flexing spheres of audio shining with a tarnished perfection, like metallic spheres floating in space with slightly worn down surfaces from encounters with the whispering winds of interstellar dust.
The music of Bayle in Eros Bleu is a mystical alphabet with some missing letters, leaving holes where reality shines through, and as more letters fall away and tumble into bottomless voids, more reality shines through, but never enough to make life concrete and stable. There is only a hint at stability and rigidity, in this music of beads of tarnished alphabets and the gleaming of reality’s lights…

This third CD is a retrospect of some of the most successful times of the GRM, in the days when real heroes rose out of the studio; in addition to Bayle people like Jean-Claude Risset, Denis Smalley, Jean Schwarz and the Grand Seigneur Francis Dhomont; a bunch of lonesome heroes, to quote Leonard Cohen. These were the years when I personally lost my sanity to the elusive magic of acousmatique.

Jean-Claude Risset’s Sud from 1984 made a hefty impression the first time I heard it, on a Wergo Schallplatten CD in 1988. There are scientific or musicological explanations of his methods to be read in the booklet, but they cannot in any way get close to describing the magic sensual motion/emotion of the piece, as it reflects worlds that can’t be viewed directly; worlds that can only be sensed in the corner of one’s eye, at moments of bliss when you’re not aware, when you travel in absentmindedness, in inward thoughts; a world of the little ones and the invisible ones, the goblins, the elves, the fairies and the myriad of beings that we do not have any names for, which we will never encounter, save through the sonic/luminary reflections of indirectness that art works like Sud offers the sensitive one.

The ringing of bells without the attack – the lingering afterglow of bells, swarming, soaring – and the wondrous overtones of oceanic waves, pitched down slowly in glissandi that shine and glitter – and this peaceful swell of water on the rocks of a shore…
Risset merges the concrete with the synthesized in a glaring tour-de-force of sonic wizardry – and I almost fall prey to stating that this is the best piece of electroacoustics ever made; a startling achievement, awesome!

Another favorite of mine, which the GRM has had the good taste to include in this historic 5-CD release on CD 3, is Denis Smalley’s Wind Chimes.
I remember that I’d just set up the gear at home after a major up-grade of equipment many years ago. Wind Chimes was the first CD that I played through it – and I was stunned! They guy who helped me bring the gear home and set it up was unfamiliar with any kind of electroacoustic music, and looked completely helpless when the first loud chime cut through the room like a shining sword!
The growling glare, the resounding clay, the springing of forces, the expansion of force fields, the rattling clatter of tumbling chimes, the sonic equivalence of clashing gravitational forces – the tear and strain of relentless pull… Wind Chimes reaches a purity of detail and a level of craftsmanship seldom heard, even in the deepest realms of today’s most celebrated studios, gallantly delivered by Smalley in 1987; a true masterpiece, a Rembrandt of the audios, difficult lighting and all.

Jean Schwarz is a composer that I early had a personal relation to, for in my first search for electroacoustic sonic adventures, way ahead of the times of the Internet, I used to strike up correspondences with artists, and Jean Schwarz at Celia Studio in France was one of the more communicative ones, so I bought a lot of his music directly from him.
Quatre Saisons, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s texts, was an acquisition I made from a Swedish distributor, though, who blessed my early electroacoustic thirst with many a refreshing composition; Euroton Musik in Hägersten, Stockholm; thank you, Eva & Rune!

Jean Schwarz’s Quatre Saison from 1983 sounds like nothing else, as the baritone Jorge Chaminé takes us through Goethe’s texts and Schwarz’s soaring, tingling and gushing sound worlds, in a subliminal way reenacting the atmosphere of each of the four seasons. GRM has really loaded CD 3 with mighty masterpieces, and this is another one. Few works have made such a deep impression on me as Quatre Saisons. It literally opened new worlds to me, new worlds of sounds, new, fresh ways of thinking. I am very grateful to Schwarz for this; it has been very important to me, yes, crucial!
Sometimes it has been hard for composers to work well with mixed material, but Jean Schwarz operates this delicate task with unheard-of mastery, merging his soaring insect electronics and the voice into a seamless flow of exciting beauty and intellectual pleasure!
On this CD we hear an excerpt of Winter; Hiver.

The last hero on CD 3 is the Grand Seigneur; the alderman of contemporeana; Francis Dhomont, who has recently moved from Quebec to France, to Avignon. If ever there was a Maestro of Acousmatique, of electroacoustics, of Le cinéma pour l’oreille, it is Francis Dhomont, born in Paris in 1926, two years before Stockhausen, and still as active as Stockhausen too.

Here he participates with the piece Novars from 1989.
Dhomont’s way with sounds defies description, really, but since I’m writing, I have to say a few words anyway. His sound pallet is incredibly rich, allowing for extremely fine-tuned nuances; hardly noticeable fragrances passing by your nocturnal nostrils, or rapidly changing wavelengths of light from a rising star over the ocean horizon – and a dark ships passes on that horizon, in a semi-transparent fog-bank; Francis Dhomont’s sonic vehicle, elusive but extraordinarily present; palpable without a determined location in time or space; romantic with a rancid wit; humorous with a dark rumble of gravity - simplicity at the heart of endless complications; clean, curved surfaces and jagged states of chaos – all in the artistic mind of this contemporary Giant of the Arts, this Gentleman of Audio; Francis Dhomont, to whom we all are in serious debt!

CD 4 is entitled Le temps du temps réel, of course indicating that we’re now in the present, when computer technology has enabled us to work complicated structures of sound in real time.
Jean-Christophe Thomas’ introduction seems a bit ambiguous to the concept of real time, indicating that it’s a sign of the time of impatience, of think less, act more, and perhaps this is a viable view – but, as I’ve said before, if there is true talent there is true art, and the untalented dilettante or the unimaginative technician is always rapidly revealed at the listening end of things… and as before, the GRM is overflowing with true talent/true art, no matter if real time processes make the ordeals of audio shaping faster.
Another reason for the hesitant anticipation with regards to real time tools was the new way of working; the composer/programmer suddenly becoming an instrumentalist, who would work with his computers much the same way musicians have always worked with their instruments. This took some getting used to, but of course, nowadays, almost all software/hardware in musical production works the real time way.
Daniel Teruggi writes an interesting article about this in the booklet for CD 4, lingering a long while at the appearance of the Syter system at GRM (synthèse en temps réel).

This whole CD is comprised of works created through Syter, most completely so, some in parts.

The first composer of the Syter CD is another great hero of sound; Bernard Parmegiani, with an excerpt from his work Exercisme 3 from 1986. Like Francis Dhomont, Bernard Parmegiani is one of the older gentlemen of reckless audio, born in 1927, having had – and certainly having! – an immense influence on contemporary art.

Parmegiani – in the Exercisme series – utilized Syter as a studio tool, embellishing and bending the sounds he’d shaped before.
This excerpt commences with bulging, flexing planes, in a ghastly mood, not far from the atmosphere of the movie Poltergeist, when that little girl is calling her mother from inside the TV static…
Parmegiani develops these spooky environments with his manual dexterity, pouring the whole ambient maze of reflective events into a star crusher machine which delivers grainy, pulsating rhythms of fragmented, sharp remains; leftovers from soaring worlds transported on the conveyor belts of Parmegiani’s electronic score, to the far reaches of this soundscape, where they seep down into giant heaps of sonic residue; the catch of Silence, the Universal Guardian of Sound… and yes, Parmegiani’s music is the closest equivalent to a very complex silence.

Horacio Vaggione, at track 4 of CD 4, appears with his work Ash, no date given. Vaggione has startled me with many fine, rhythmic endeavor before, like with his piece Tar for bass clarinet and tape, a masterly journey through the minuscule, extraneous sounds of vents and valves of the instrument! He surprised me by showing me how much the outlook on life changes with the perspective, with the size and with the distance/closeness.
Ash is such a piece too, starting with dripping, thudding small objects, like nano-size spheres of steel falling onto a metallic surface, clean and clear, gathering momentum and mass, evolving from rhythmic properties to pitch, from metal drops to rain drops and from prickly mini-thuds to thunder-claps between the mountains. Surely this is studio work per se, a clear evolution of miniature worlds so insignificant you hardly take notice into overwhelming soundscapes that flush you away like a tsunami…

François Bayle, who nowadays publishes his own edition on Magison, is a Maestro of the Poetic Gesture, of the diligent, delicate sonic formulation; a wizard of transparent atmospheres and the infinitesimal nuance, the seamless transposition of green into turquoise, of pink into purple… a artist of noblesse, of class, and with the poetic soul of a Medieval bard.
To listen to Bayle you have to fine-tune your senses, but once you have, you’re in for a rare ride through exquisite atmospheric vibrations, like traveling the depths of abstract art, like touching ideas and thoughts and inclinations in a mystically palpable way.

Here Bayle presents Mimaméta from 1989, or rather an excerpt of it.
Mimaméta is no exception to the above stated; it’s a fluent semaphoric mountain top signaling of lucid thinking, of gentle philosophies, colorful transients… an on-line transmission out of the inner reaches of wink-of-an-eye worlds, of inclinations inherent in passing, fleeting moments; a sudden fragrance from out of temporary wormholes to parallel universes or hidden properties of this; sounds testifying to occurrences beyond time and place, beyond structure and intent…

Daniel Teruggi’s sample on this CD is taken from his work Instants d’hiver, parts 3 to 7 of 10.
A shuffling, grayish rhythm reminiscent of someone running in a relaxed but determined way with too wide pants is accompanied or sewed into a repetitious, soft, distant figure that sounds minimal, California-style minimal, but with that typical dream-state of a Southern France garden in late summer; that melancholy and lustful soaring of mind and emotions and inner views; remembrances of things to come… and the dis-temporal child-voice incisions fly past like diving swifts!
This is part 3 of Instants d’hiver, and it is more directly beautiful than anything I’ve heard in quite a while.
The next part, i.e. number 4 of the Instants d’hiver, is a wilder statement, winding up from standing still into speed-freak hallucinations of flying kitchenware and screws and bolts out of Grandpa’s garage! Somewhere in this maze of hallucinations armies march up under swelling motion picture fanfares as starchy cartoon characters shoot up in comic strip alleys deep in the soundscape…

The fifth and last CD in this magnificent retrospective collection of the GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales – is called Le GRM sans le savoir (GRM Without Knowing It); a scrambled mix of all kinds of odds and ends from the lively organization’s annals; a pot luck of sonic surprises out on a limb, in many instances perhaps not typical of the known and famous produce of the studio, and therefore especially interesting; a bonus CD of stray audio – but not only that, because this CD also brings forth some real state of the art electroacoustics by, for example, Bernard Parmegiani and Jean Schwarz – even though Christian Zanési in his introduction to the fifth CD brands the works therein as, perhaps, less serious that the truly serious works of the composers involved. Well, maybe so, in part – but I can’t bring myself to think less of La roue Ferris or Il était une fois, even though Parmegiani and Schwarz may have devoted most of their efforts to… well, more serious fun!

However, some of the other pieces here may be fringe electronics: more of a leisure attempt, never having had history book ambitions, like the gluey, sticky craze of Robert Wyatt’s and François Bayle’s outrageous sound poetry/electro poetry incident It, which falls well into the enclosed field of cut-up permutations and repetitious minimalism darndom!
The sound is circling you like a swarm of bees, the voice blabbering his “I did it again” sentence in and out of phase, in and out of veils of obscuring layers of dimmed sonorities, short moments passing through glary sunlight, heard close up and clear, only to whirl up and around and into the obscurities again. True fun; elegant fun!

Jean Schwarz’s With No J from the work Il était une fois is a masterly rhythmic stubbornness! I first heard this on an LP that I bought directly from Schwarz long ago, since then transferred to DAT when I got a DAT machine, and then, of course, to CDR when those burners came around – but the whole Il était une fois also came on an official Schwarz double CD some years ago.
Anyhow, the brown rubber-type rhythm, flung out like a ferocious leather whip in a rhythm so tight and good that it almost – but not really – takes on the property of a pitch, has the ability to kick butt, yessir!
The speedy progression wobbles and wrangles as it dots down the line like a maddened sidewinder across the sand dunes of a desert. This is a kind of electro-pop, I’d say, but with the wit of a glorious artist of the sonorities; a masterly bar-bender with a quirky smile hinted in the corner of his mouth!

I’ll end this review with Bernard Parmegiani’s La roue Ferris, which is another one of those classics that was released on GRM’s first CD – Concert Imaginaire – in 1984. Here it is again, in all its splendor of sonic imagination and ear-tight handicraft.
Since this was one of my earlier love affairs with electroacoustic music, I may be biased, but I must say, on having it enter my anatomy again after a few years of not hearing it, that it is charged with the most magic romance, the most elastic eroticism, the darnest pausing of any line of withheld – and then bursting! – sexual motion/emotion, fingertips of audio tapping your forehead and your thighs, your lover’s fingers through your hair; the wave-motion of lust and a soaring, bell-like retreat into the overtone spectra of ecstasy… Le roue Ferris!

I haven’t been able to mention each and every work of this mighty 5-CD box. This would be too time-consuming and hardly in line with my more intuitive or perhaps nonchalant way of writing about this and that without much planning; just letting my impressions flow onto the computer keyboard and into the Macintosh, for further delivery onto the web page – and I can testify that most of the pieces that I picked out for scrutiny were determined randomly, in a close-your-eyes-and-point manner! This means that there is MUCH more to hear on these five CDs than what is apparent from my text.

To conclude, this 5-CD box from the GRM is one of the most significant releases to come out of the early 21st century, and certainly one that one cannot be without, if one has any concern for modern art of any kind. Blessed be the GRM!

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