The first release on Portraits GRM, issued in association with Editions Mego, has a lot of history behind it. First, it is a new initiative of the long-running INA GRM, or the Groupe de Recherches Musicales as part of France’s National Audiovisual Institute. This takes us back to the mid-20th entury in connection to the burgeoning avant-garde scene of the era. Flashing us forward a few decades, the innovations of GRM heavily impacted composer Jim O’Rourke as a young man. Jumping ahead to 2019, an older and accomplished O’Rourke completed Shutting Down Here as commissioned by INA GRM. In 2020, the resulting 35-minute piece is released in North America on August 14 on vinyl and digital.
Portraits GRM describes Shutting Down Here as symbolically spanning a 30-year period, this timeframe demarking O’Rourke’s two visits to the GRM, first as a budding artist and second as an experienced, indeed storied, creator. Absorbing this knowledge helps to transform O’Rourke’s piece, which is the first in a new series (titling the label) which focuses on contemporary experimental works; SPGRM 002 also releases on August 14, a split LP featuring Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani, and a Fly) by Max Eilbacher and Forma by Lucy Railton (more on this release in TVD’s August 13th New in Stores).
The transformation of which I speak carries Shutting Down Here from a simple commission into the realms of reflective appreciation. It’s not overstating matters to call it a gesture of subtle hommage on the part of O’Rourke (but also so much more than that), partly because Portraits GRM is intended to be a contempo extension to the earlier GRM collection of recordings.
The GRM’s prior output was released in an earlier series/ label, Recollection GRM, also in connection with Editions Mego, that began in 2012 and ran right up to this year, featuring recordings by GRM founder Pierre Schaeffer, Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, François Bayle, Beatriz Ferreyra, Michel Redolfi, and Iannis Xenakis. To date, Recollection GRM has issued 23 discs, and a stated intention of Portraits GRM is to reignite the spark of invention found in the earlier series and also the Prospective 21e Siècle line of recordings from the Philips label.
O’Rourke’s piece is a multi-dimensional and at times startling representation of the bridge between GRM past and present, with the whole realizing with assurance the label’s stated desire to connect with “explorers of the future.” Shutting Down Here also effectively portrays O’Rourke’s range, offering composition for instruments (here, Eiko Ishibashi’s piano, Atsuko Hatano’s, violin and viola, and Eivind Lonning’s trumpet), field recordings and electronic elements.
The diversity in O’Rourke’s composition, which at various points recalls Modernist and Minimalist classical and at other moments is reminiscent of abstract ambient techno and fleetingly, even post-rock, in some ways reflects the GRM’s growth from its beginnings in connection with Schaeffer and his revolutionary concept of musique concrète through the emergence of electroacoustic composers (many included in the Recollection GRM series) to the development of synthesizers and in the 1990s, the introduction of music-making technology including GRM Tools software.
But crucial to its success, Shutting Down Here isn’t any kind of linear progression through 20th century experimental music’s greatest hits. As stated above, the work’s connection to the past, while loving, is subtle, though there are a few jarring juxtapositions, such as, early on, a full-bodied burst of chamber Modernism that quickly drops through a trapdoor exit and leaves behind surge-gurgles of electronics.
But more often, the electronic aspects, the field recordings, and the acoustic instrumentation productively intermingle. There are a few spots with snipping and splicing redolent of the ’60s avant-garde pioneers that gets combined with textures evoking the electronic ’90s, and additionally, passages that would work wonderfully as a soundtrack to or incidental music for an abstract-arty sci-fi opus, so anybody who fancies themselves as the next Tarkovsky should take note.
There’s also a plucked-string pulse that bookends the piece, lending an air of foreboding that is intensified through restraint, while a piano (sampled?) emerges near the finale, the playing inspiring thoughts of Morton Feldman. That’s terrific. Overall, Shutting Down Here is a deeply multifaceted work that’s never overstuffed or unfocused. The influence and inspiration of INA GRM on O’Rourke is clear in the vitality and unpredictable nature of the finished piece, making it a fine inaugural release for Portraits GRM.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
