Åke Parmerud

Nécropolis gathers four works by Åke Parmerud composed between 2005 and 2011 for multichannel systems in Paris, Bourges and Karlsruhe, from six channels up to the 43 loudspeakers of the ZKM Klangdom, and presented here in stereo. Each starts from a precise source or situation and moves it towards something imagined.

Dreaming in Darkness, commissioned by the Ina-GRM, tries to picture the dreams of someone who cannot see. It opens like a film soundtrack of doors and changing rooms and drifts into abstraction; it began as an exchange of sounds with Natasha Barrett, whose material enters in the second half. Crystal Counterpoint, dedicated to Mireille Leblanc, uses only the sound of glasses, most of them crystal, recorded when his parents’ house was sold: the same glasses whose tinkling at their parties once put him to sleep on the stairs. Parmerud acknowledges that Jonty Harrison, Trevor Wishart and Horacio Vaggione worked with glass before him. The piece shared the Prix Ton Bruynèl in 2010.

ReVoiced returns to the voices he collected around the world in 1992 for Grains of Voices and gives four of them a movement each, from south to north: an Aboriginal man from Bathurst Island, a Russian woman singing a folk melody, a Kathakali singer from New Delhi and a jojk chanted by a shaman from Swedish Lapland. Every sound in a movement derives from its single voice. It was made possible by the 2008 Giga-Hertz-Award Special Prize. Necropolis: City of the Dead, for the GRM’s Multiphonies series, is a guided tour through catacombs where great music of the past lies in various states of decomposition, still recognisable as it falls apart.

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 twice the Swedish Grammis, and he has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 1998.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 16137, 2016.