Åke Parmerud

Growl gathers five works composed by Åke Parmerud between 2004 and 2015, several of them written for multichannel systems and heard here in stereo. Across the album he deliberately crosses the line between electroacoustic music and electronica, noise and metal, often by taking up materials he had once considered clichés.

La vie mécanique, commissioned by the IMEB and realized in its Charybde studio in Bourges, uses only sounds of machinery to tell the birth, death and rebirth of a mechanical life form, moving from electroacoustic writing to repetition and something close to techno; it received a special prize at the Giga-Hertz-Preis 2008. Grooves was made in May 2011 in the 43-channel Klangdom of the ZKM in Karlsruhe from the surface noise of Kai Hanekken’s large vinyl collection, which he digitized for the piece. Parmerud calls it the most hardcore thing he has done and asks for it to be played loud. Electric Birds, a GRM commission, breaks his promise never to use birdsong: recordings of New Zealand birds that sound electric, left almost untouched in the first half.

Growl!, commissioned by Musiques & Recherches, is a piece for a “growlers choir” of four metal vocalists from his home town, recruited through his son, with dystopian lyrics by Axel Widén built around the line “Hell is us; Die we must”. Transmissions II, commissioned by Sveriges Radio, follows a 2012 work for the Bergen choir KorVest; it is made mainly from electronic signals and noise, with some of the vinyl material from Grooves, and was conceived with oscilloscope-based video.

Born in Lidköping in 1953, Parmerud trained as a photographer before studying music in Gothenburg. He has received 17 international prizes and two Swedish Grammis awards, and has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 1998.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 15132, 2015.