This bundle collects the two most recent Recollection GRM releases:

Michèle Bokanowski "Rhapsodia / Battements Solaires" (LP)
Lionel Marchetti "La grande vallee / Micro-climat" (LP)


Since the mid-2010s, Recollection GRM - the celebrated vinyl only imprint attached to the archives of the legendary Paris based studio and collective Groupe De Recherches Musicales - has issued some of the most exciting artefacts of experimental electronic music to have graced out ears. Initially focused on the output of seminal figures like Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani, Guy Reibel, Iannis Xenakis, François Bayle, etc., over the last few years the label’s carefully curated catalog has increasingly veered toward astounding works composed by lesser known, but equally deserving artists associated with the studio. Their latest two LPs, Lionel Marchetti’s La grande vallee / Micro-climat and Michèle Bokanowski’s Rhapsodia / Battements Solaires, are shining examples of this recent shift. While radically different in character - the former comprising bristling works of musique concrète created in the late '80s and early '90s, while the latter is made up of stunning recent electroacoustic compositions - each is an illuminating immersion into the remarkable potential of electronic processes by two of the most exciting voices in the contemporary field.


Michèle Bokanowski "Rhapsodia / Battements Solaires" (LP)

A student of both Pierre Schaeffer and Eliane Radigue, since her emergence during the 1970s, the French composer, Michèle Bokanowski, has carved a fascinating trajectory with the fields of electronic and electroacoustic music. Working primarily for film, television, and dance, over a discography of works that span the decades, she has built a singular world of profound sonic densities, colours, and depth. In the words of GRM’s artist director François Bonnet ( Kassel Jaeger), Bokanowski’s immense talent lies in her particular ability to “find the right development for each sound, letting it blossom before altering it, adapting the musical structure to let the sounds 'be', even if it sometimes means returning to the most basic form”, truths that are impossible to avoid across the two sides of Recollection GRM’s LP, Rhapsodia / Battements Solaires.

Only the second time Bokanowski’s work has ever appeared on vinyl, Rhapsodia / Battements Solaires comprises two works of astounding scope, honesty, and artistic sensitivity. The first, Rhapsodia (two movements and one interlude) was created in 2018 in the composer's own studio and is dedicated to the choreographer, Marceline Lartigue, with whom she worked. An electroacoustic effort of striking restraint built around subtle cycles and pulses threaded by shifting long-tones, the composition’s gracefully interlaced elements form into stunning expanses of meditative ambience that seem bound to the recent loss of the composer’s calibrator and friend.

The second work, Battements Solaires, composed in 2008 for her husband Patrick Bokanowski's film of the same name, delves even deeper into astounding expanses of brooding, electroacoustic ambience. Rubbling lows form a root for near imperceptible tonal shifts and layers of textural intervention that seem to bend temporarily and be lost in time, forming a radical rethinking of terms and definitions of drone.

Unquestionably one of the most engaging and exciting efforts of electroacoustic music we’ve heard all year, Michèle Bokanowski’s Rhapsodia / Battements Solaires is a truly stunning accomplishment that remains locked in the mind and ear long after its last sounding has rung. A truly singular voice that leaves you longing for more, it would be impossible to recommend this one enough. Among the best of Recollection GRM’s releases, it’s bound to blow minds and fly off the shelves.


Lionel Marchetti "La grande vallee / Micro-climat" (LP)

A long-standing member of Groupe De Recherches Musicales, the French composer, Lionel Marchetti, is one of the great contemporary exponents of musique concrète and acousmatic playback, having worked in the idioms since the late 1980s - producing dozens of solo and collaborative releases - and written extensively on the subjects. He is regarded as among the most important figures within the idiom’s third wave.

Recollection GRM’s LP, La grande vallee / Micro-climat, dives back toward the earliest days of the composer’s catalog of works. The album’s first side comprises the work La grande vallee, which was created at GRM between 1993 and 1995, before its original release in 1998 as part of Metamkine’s legendary Cinéma Pour L'Oreille series. Drawing on a vast range of recordings from diverse sources - many taken from the natural world - over the works’ 20+ minutes, Marchetti weaves a startlingly imagistic and hauntingly musical tapestry of sonority. Shadows of ambience rise and fall amongst long tones and bristling textures, sculpting a space to be occupied fully, and where the boundaries between obscurity, clarity, and abstraction fade within expanses of brilliantly balanced organisations of sound.

The entire second side is given over to an earlier work, Micro-climat, created by Marchetti in 1989 and 1990 at the CFMI studios in Lyon, but remaining unreleased until 2001, when it appeared on his CD only release, Sirrus, issued by Auscultare Research. While radically different and arguably more explicitly experimental in its material presence than La grande vallee, the work similarly speaks from Marchetti’s intimate relationship with the natural world, drawing much of its inspiration and source material from his wanderings during this period in the Vercors mountains and Monts du Forez in the south of France. Building on heavily processed tones and textures that dance with interspersed environment sounds - locatable and unplaceable - the work’s engrossing structures pulse with energy in a careful balance between pure abstraction and the ephemeral trace.

Largely unknown outside of France and a small number of devoted fans of experimental electronic practice, Recollection GRM’s LP, La grande vallee / Micro-climat, presents Lionel Marchetti as a crucial and welcome voice in late 20th and 21st century musique concrète. A deeply poetic channeling of the natural world through rigorously experiential techniques, with its two works appearing for the first time ever on vinyl, it’s a vibrant and engrossing listen from start to finish that shouldn’t be missed. Like all things from the label, it’s bound to go fast so grab it while you can.