Åke Parmerud

Grains is a reissue gathering four stereo works that Åke Parmerud composed between 1990 and 1995, three of them commissioned by radio and studio institutions and several awarded at Bourges, Arras and Stockholm.

Grains of Voices, commissioned by Sveriges Radio, began as a project on the human voice as a symbol of a scattered but shared world. Between February and May 1994 Parmerud travelled to Venezuela, Fiji, Australia, India and Bali and came back with close to 20 hours of recordings: people said or sang whatever they wanted, monks of the Namgyal monastery in Dharamsala among them. The piece moves through “islands” of childhood songs, prayers, the voices of dead poets, opera meeting Balinese shadow plays and Tibetan singing, and ends with a roar that proclaims silence. It premiered at the United Nations headquarters in New York in October 1997.

Jeux imaginaires, made at the GMEB in Bourges, takes the 22nd game of the 1992 match between Anatoli Karpov and Garry Kasparov as a nightly ritual; its middle section derives drum rhythms from the thinking times of the first 19 moves. Les objets obscurs, composed in Studio 116 of the Ina-GRM in 1991, is a set of spoken riddles in French, each followed by a movement built from a single object: a lock, a chair, twenty-two stone marbles, the voice. Alias, which won first prize at Bourges in 1991, starts from the life of Carlo Gesualdo and reworks John Dowland’s song A Shepherd in a Shade and fragments of Gesualdo’s late motets.

Born in Lidköping in 1953, Parmerud trained as a photographer before studying music in Gothenburg. Since Närheter won first prize at Bourges in 1978 he has received 17 international prizes, and he has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 1998.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 18150, 2018.