marsen jules: at grm

Following his highly-acclaimed album Beautyfear, which is still featured besides Trentemøller and Bonobo in the top-ten of German chill out charts, sound poet Marsen Jules bridges the time with the release of a conceptual mini-album on his own Oktaf Records. The two tracks on the 35-minute long album were created during a two-week residency in the legendary GRM-Studios at Radio France in Paris. The Groupe de Recherches Musicales is an institute for the exploration of electroacoustic music. It was founded in 1958 by composer Pierre Schaeffer, one of the main protagonists of so-called "musique concrete," a musical movement that focused on recorded sounds and sound manipulations as a basis for compositions. Therefore, the artists used tape recorders and record players as their instruments and widened the musical horizon, which until then was only defined through classically-known instruments. These ideas of defining every acoustic event as possible music and the approach to explore the individual universe of such a sound have always been a big inspiration for Martin Juhls' music. Therefore, it was a big honor for the artist to be able to work at this legendary space for two weeks in 2009. For the two tracks created at GRM, Jules dives deeply into the level of subatomic sound-particles. Clusters of string crescendos emerge from a nearly psychoacoustic sound-wall of warm drones in which they disappear with ultra-long fade-outs and reverbs. A touching work -- which has the quality to let the listener drown into it completely.