A split album as part of the GRM Portraits series bringing together two pieces by the French bassoonist and the Norwegian composer.
"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.
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."
François J. Bonnet
Perpetrating the fertile collaboration initiated in 2012 with Recollection GRM, INA GRM and Shelter Press (after
Editions Mego) offer the Portraits GRM complementary series, no longer focused on the "classic" GRM repertoire but towards recent creations commissioned by the GRM to artists from all horizons. Under the aegis of
François J. Bonnet, the Portraits GRM series focuses on important and emerging figures of the experimental music scene and highlights the notion of work rather than album. 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. Many releases in the collection are contemporary works by two different musicians, each piece taking up the space of one side. Longer works however, fill an entire record.
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval is a French bassoonist who explores sound through contemporary music interpretation and electroacoustic performance. Her research has translated into an intuitive investigation of the bassoon's complex acoustical properties, embracing the elusive behavior of overtones as well as the countless possibilities in timbral shadings and idiosyncratic tunings. Her instrumental practice has led to the creation of a significant body of solo pieces in close collaboration with a handful of composers (
Éliane Radigue, Jakob Ullmann,
Alvin Lucier, Peter Ablinger,
Phill Niblock, Catherine Lamb, Tashi Wada). Vicente-Sandoval also pursues an exploration of feedback generation and its contingent musicality.
Lars Petter Hagen (born 1975) is a Norwegian composer and curator. His work ranges from large-scale symphonic pieces to intimate chamber music and sound installations, via works for stage and film.
