We commissioned ‘Towards a Music for Large Ensemble’ for the Seventh Edition Festival collaboration with INA GRM. We got lucky with the funding lottery and could channel a little money to Daniel so he could spend some proper time to move his series of single instrument etudes towards a work of greater scale and combinatory potential.
‘Towards...’ had its live premiere in February 2024 at Eric Ericssonhallen in Stockholm, presented via the GRM’s acousmonium that had been transported to Stockholm for the occasion. We released an LP with the recording of that performance alongside a second take Daniel recorded at his studio as Fönstret—14.
The generative computer music system Daniel made to realise the work used a collection of recordings with 64 different acoustic instruments and physical objects. Weightings for how these combine, start and stop, the shape of their gain envelope, playback speed and spatialisation allows Daniel to influence their distribution and density in new ways. Inevitably, the system was not something to be contained by physical playback formats or performance slots at a festival. The epic 10+ hour version Daniel put together to accompany the LP release hinted that there were always going to be other routes to follow.
In May 2025 Daniel trained it down to Paris for another outing on the acousmonium, continuing to explore, expand and refine the work’s dynamics. Now, in the first weeks of March 2026 the GRM have presented ‘Listening Room’ — an eight channel installation in the beautiful glass pavilion of Zone2Source in Amstelpark for the Sonic Acts Biennale. Rather than present the same extant iteration of ‘Towards a Music for Large Ensemble’, Daniel responded to the invitation by creating the 6 new renditions of the piece that we share here as ‘Towards A Music For Large Ensemble, Acts I—VI’.
This digital only release is Fönstret—19.
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.
