Pierre Mariétan (1935–2025) was a prolific Swiss composer, sound artist, and pioneer in acoustic ecology who spent most of his life working in France. Over his long career, he composed more than 300 instrumental, orchestral, vocal, and electronic pieces. Mariétan studied under avant-garde legends like Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann. In 1966, he founded GERM (Groupe d’Étude et de Réalisation Musicales), a music collective that blurred the lines between strict composition and free improvisation. In 1979 Mariétan founded the Laboratoire d'Acoustique Urbaine (Urban Acoustics Laboratory) to bridge environmental sounds, urban architecture, and musical composition.
Mariétan was also a professor at the University of Paris where he taught the relationship between sound and space. Later in life, he remained active as a director for the Movement of Environmental Sound and continued developing permanent, immersive sound installations across the globe. His album Musique d’été was originally released on cassette back in 1983 by Éditions Salabert and Costin Miereanu’s Poly-Art International, and it has been remixed for this LP reissue. The record splits his vision of "Summer Music" into two different vibes. Side A is a deep dive into an electronic, synthesizer-driven landscape, while Side B features raw acoustic field recordings of forests and traditional Swiss alphorns.