CD – Mode Records

This first complete recording of Stries is published by Mode Records, a New York label focusing on contemporary classical music and other forms of avant-garde performance. Stries is a composition for three synthesizers and a tape recorder by Bernard Parmegiani. It was written for the experimental trio TM+, founded in 1977 at INA/GRM and comprised of Yann Geslin, Laurent Cuniot and Denis Dufour. The work was not well received at the time and was largely forgotten for the next 30 years. However, Yann Geslin kept Parmegiani’s original score, and the analogue reel-to-reel tape and 8-track recordings from the master sessions were later discovered in the GRM archives. It is this discovery that has allowed the electronic music trio of Colette Broeckaert, Martin Lorenz and Sebastian Berweck, together with Yann Geslin, recreate all the parts of the original composition. The goal of their recreation is to bring the work to the attention of a wider audience and also to make the score available for others to interpret and perform.
Stries is a work in three parts. The first, “Strilento” is a piece for tape solo and can be played alone. The second, “Strio”, and final part, the eponymous “Stries”, make direct use of the old tapes and analogue synthesizers used by the original trio of musicians. Sebastian Berweck’s liner notes provide an insight into the reconstruction of Stries for both performance and this recording, reminding us that in the history of avant-garde music issues between audio devices and live instruments are nothing new. Stries is certainly one of Bernard Parmegiani’s most complex and futuristic compositions. It is stimulated by a polyphonic drive which, in the context of a post-twentieth-century reinterpretation, gives us back all the strength and charm of a vibrant, cosmic and sharp work.

 

Bernard Parmegiani – Stries