Audiopile Review: With the tragic death of Peter ‘Pita’ Rehberg in 2021, it was reasonable to assume that Editions Mego and its sub-labels would cease operations. Heartening to see that Recollection GRM, the sub-label dedicated to mining the vaults of France’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales, is still a going concern. Lend your ear to Horacio Vaggione’s recently unearthed ‘Schall / Rechant’, an absolute masterclass in advanced granular synthesis techniques. Portraits GRM, is a kind of sub-sub-label dedicated to more contemporary GRM-related electro-acoustic endeavours. ‘Manifolds / Octavia’, the label’s latest release, is particularly notable for featuring a new work by the very excellent Laurel Halo. But do not sleep on Jessica Ekomane’s ‘Manifolds’, which makes up the A-side of this LP. Starting out as a dense, industrial soundscape, it takes many mind-bending detours that really demand your attention. Laurel Halo’s ‘Octavia’ is predictably excellent. Cinematic, melancholy, and subtly psychedelic, it’s another major work from an important figure in today’s electronic music landscape.

Jessica EKOMANE « Manifolds »
Entirely computer-generated, Manifolds is a work that explores the multiple possibilities of polyphonic writing, extending it to the “multiphonic” universe where sources and timbres diffract themselves in the listening space. The different voices of the composition no longer follow the traditional parallel trajectories of musical dialogue, but find themselves propelled as if into a particle accelerator, a “collider” freed from all formal rhetoric to reach a state of liberation of energies that is truly confounding. It is then that, in the multi-layered universe of sonic electrons, as if against its own will, a “chant” of overwhelming humanity is revealed.

Laurel HALO « Octavia » (2022)
Octavia, a piece for piano and electronics, explores the relationship between melodic motifs and textures in a singular way, intermittent moments of melody, harmony and sound materials connecting and disconnecting, to indicate a series of nets or webs, swaying in and out of one another. These sonic nets gently float, spin and merge, and the effect is one of gently floating over an abyss. The work is inspired by the “spiderweb city” of the same name in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “Below there is nothing for hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; further down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed….Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.”