Okkyung Lee + Beatrice Dillon + Lionel Marchetti + Daniel M Karlsson

Friday 23 February 2024 • 7pm

A promotional poster for "Edition VII GRM" at Eric Ericsonhallen from February 22-25, 2024, featuring names of artists and supporters, with an image of audio equipment in the background.

Knut Wiggen — EMS för sig själv
Daniel M Karlsson — Towards a Music for Large Ensemble
Lionel Marchetti — Icare Noir (l'Attachement)
Beatrice Dillon — basho
Bernard Parmegiani — points contre champs
Okkyung Lee — Silpuri

First day of concerts for the Seventh Edition Festival including new works by Okkyung Lee and Beatrice Dillon (Basho) and the premiere of a new commission from Daniel M Karlsson — Towards a Music for Large Ensemble.

edition vii grm is a collaboration with INA GRM and presented on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Elektronmusikstudion EMS. Made possible with support from Kulturrådet (The Swedish Arts Council), Region Stockholm, Stockholm City, Nordic Culture Fund and Goethe–Institut Schweden.

Daniel M Karlsson commission supported by Kulturrådet (The Swedish Arts Council).

Lee is one of the most dynamic forces in improvised music today, a fearless and compelling musician whose playing incorporates a love of noise, extraordinary technique and elements from the outer fringes of contemporary composition.

Lee has collaborated with many of the leading figures in creative music today, including Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Wadada Leo Smith, Ikue Mori, Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Carlos Giffoni and Maja Rajtke. In 2013 she released 'Ghil' an LP of solo improvisations recorded direct to dictaphone by Lasse Marhaug that was widely hailed as the 'noise record of the year'.

“Okkyung Lee distorts, disturbs and even deconstructs her instrument, to the point of rendering it unrecognisable. And the results are simply amazing.” – Joseph Burnett, The Quietus

Bernard Parmegiani was a French composer born October 27th 1927, died November 21st 2013 in Paris. He was one of the pioneers of electro-acoustic music. Throughout his 80-strong corpus of concert pieces, he experimented with new and original production techniques to highlight the multiple aspects of the nature of sound. He also wrote “applied” works for radio, television, cinema, ballet, advertising and the stage, as well as opening and end credits and jingles such as the one for Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport.

His father, an editor at Editions Gautier-Languereau and author of a few of the Bécassine comic strips, died two months after Bernard was born. Following his mother’s second marriage, Parmegiani grew up between two pianos – that of his virtuoso father-in-law, and that of his teacher mother. From his bedroom he heard on one side the daily scales and Clementi sonatas, and on the other the pianistic repertory of Fauré and Debussy. Thorough ear training which would acquaint him with the state of listening essential to his composition work later.

Daniel M Karlsson

Daniel M Karlsson is a long standing fixture of Stockholm’s experimental electronic music scene. He’s been an important part of its key infrastructure including Fylkingen, Norberg Festival and the fabled Elektronmusikstudion EMS where he now teaches various courses.

A well known evangelist for the open source music coding platform SuperCollider, its rare for someone to spend more than five minutes in his company without getting a run down on how you, too can get SuperClean installed on your computer and be making your own computer music in a matter of minutes.

As a composer, he works extensively with algorithmic composition to organize sound in a way that brings texture and timbre to the fore.

www.danielmkarlsson.com

Knut Wiggen

Knut Wiggen (1927–2016) was a Norwegian-Swedish pianist, administrator, and composer. Influenced by Musique Concrète and pioneers of electronic music, he quickly rose to a leading position within the Swedish music avant-garde.

From 1959 to 1969, he served as the chairman and dominant ideologist of the Fylkingen association. In 1964, he established the Electronic Music Studio at Sveriges Radio, which, in 1969, transformed into Elektronmusikstudion (EMS). This initiative contributed to Stockholm becoming a European hub for electronic music composers. As the studio director at EMS until 1975, his vision significantly shaped the studio’s activities. Collaborating with the studio’s programmers, he focused on developing techniques for sound generation and composition using computers, particularly through the proprietary composition program MusicBox—a modular, object-based environment for music programming in the EMS computer studio. During the same period, he organized the Visioner av nuet festival (1966) and UNESCO’s international conference Music and Technology: The Composer in the Technological Era (1970).

EMS för sig själv (EMS for Itself) was composed at EMS on Kungsgatan 8 in 1975. The piece is an early example of computer-assisted generative music. Due to the time-consuming calculations performed by the EMS studio computer, Wiggen left the computer running overnight after the workday. Upon returning the next morning, he discovered an unforeseen event had occurred, causing the computer to generate music that he perceived as detached from the composer’s true intentions. He concluded that the computer had developed its own life and asked technician Per-Olov Strömberg to record the audible result on a tape recorder.