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RE: [microsound] Parmegiani - is there a sites with info on him?



A new CD of Parmegiani is out on Plate Lunch: www.platelunch.com

Marc
-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Cooper [mailto:scooper@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 1999 5:42 PM
To: microsound
Subject: Re: [microsound] Parmegiani - is there a sites with info on
him?


At 10:15 PM 12/5/99 +0000, you wrote:
>I´m searching for sites with info on the works, biography and person of
>Bernard Parmegiani - any help in sight?

here's a brief bio i wrote for the all-music guide (dunno why it's not up
on their site yet...).

sc


Parmegiani, Bernard
(Electronic/Computer)

A composer of academic-leaning computer music, Bernard Parmegiani is
closely associated with the Parisian Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM),
which has produced such luminaries of electronic and acousmatic music as
Francoise Bayle, Jean-Claude Risset, and Luc Ferrari, among others. While
his music is only likely to appeal to a narrow subset of contemporary
listeners, his influence on more accommodating styles of post-techno has
been notable. Named-checked by the likes of Autechre, Monolake, and Kit
Clayton, Parmegiani's detailed soundscapes of drones and
computer-synthesized textures bare some relation to the more experimental
edges of current electronica, and occupy adjecent sonorous, if not
conceptual, territory to the digital ambient and glitch experiments of
Tetsu Inoue, Coil, Farmers Manual, and the like. Born in Paris in 1927,
Parmegiani was a student of the piano from a young age, although exposure
to the first experiments in musique concrete by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre
Henry via the family radio ignited a taste for music's less explicit
possibilities early on. Subsequent work in television pointed to his
interest in the visual arts, particularly photomontage, but by the late
'50s, Parmegiani was focused on turning out his first experiments in
musique concrete. He managed to get his music heard by Shaeffer in 1959,
and shortly after, he began working at the GRM as a sound engineer. He also
enrolled in the GRM's training sequence, and by the early '60s had been
asked to join the GRM as an official composer. The subsequent two decades
would be the most prolific of his career, bookended by a pair of
masterpieces, =De Natura Sonorum= and =La Creation Du Monde=, and
interspersed with a dozen collaborations with instrumentalists, jazz
musicians, and vocalists, as well as visual and theatrical work.
Parmegiaini has experimented with video, performance art, and, of all
things, mime; he studied with the celebrated Jacques Lecoq and made a
number of television and film appearances. Currently retired, he lives in
the South of France, where he continues to compose.

Recommended recording:

La Creation Du Monde (Ina-GRM)  1996
A sprawling, ambitious painting in sound modeled on the birth of the
universe. Moving from roiling gaseous clouds of hiss and static through
sharp peels of detailed, unrestrained texture, this is acousmatic music at
its very finest, literally creating a universe of sound out of thin air.


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