University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520409774, LINGUA, 424 pages, 2025, USA

The Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), emerging from the advent of musique concrète and later electroacoustic music, represents a pivotal moment in the history of music and technology. Évelyne Gayou, who has been part of the GRM as a researcher, composer, and producer, is uniquely positioned to reconstruct its history through its people, resources, archives, and broader context. With a rigorous approach, she reconciles contrasting aspects – such as the sometimes chaotic dynamism and the ongoing institutional support – in the manner of a historian, navigating a vast archive of 1,500 catalogued works, 2,000 hours of radio programmes, and thousands of other significant media items, including the essential compositional tools developed at the GRM. The guiding principle for selecting material is the originality demonstrated and the impact made on the musical scene. The two parts of the text, ‘Organizing Forgetting’ and ‘Memorializing the Facts’, reflect, in the former, the need to highlight key themes, and in the latter, a systematic chronology of events, facts, and concepts, organised by decade. Translated and updated from the original French edition, this engaging work traces the role of the GRM in the collective, unconventional, and philosophical use of recording technology, which has inspired decades of avant-garde music.