"Places that offer artists the opportunity to make real experiments are becoming a rare commodity.

Did you know that? Albi is home to one of the most active musical creation centres in France. Directed by Didier Aschour and his team, the GMEA sees the great names of today's music, from France or elsewhere, without aesthetic blinkers. Interview.

The general public knows little - if anything - about the GMEA. What do you do?

The GMEA is the acronym for the Albi Electroacoustic Music Group. The centre was born from an electroacoustic music studio founded in the early 1980s. We received the label "Centre national de création musicale" in 2000, and today our name does not quite reflect everything that goes on here! Our mission is to bring new music to life, to enable its production. We have a whole section of commissioned works, artist residencies and we ensure the dissemination of the repertoire with a season of concerts within our walls and in the region, as far as Toulouse. We also have a festival, "Riverrun", which takes place every year at the beginning of October, for about ten days. Another highlight is the "Semaine du son", which takes place all over France in the middle of winter, at the end of January, and in which we gladly take part. It's a week of workshops, concerts, sound installations and exhibitions throughout Albi. Each year, we propose a theme or a composer's portrait. Not surprisingly, the 2021 edition, which we had planned to devote to John Cage, has been cancelled. We will redeploy our actions at different times of the year. 

Myriam Pruvot on Lhoop, the Gmea show on Radio Octopus

You defend a vast and extremely diversified repertoire, but some people call it a "niche" repertoire. How do you promote your artists and their music?

There is no magic formula, you have to reach out to the public, from the earliest age. We do cultural action with schools with listening courses for schoolchildren, which last three or four sessions, meetings with the musicians in residence... The fact that we are associated with a specific area - Albi, the Tarn - also creates a loyal audience, which comes back, curious, year after year. We defend a very vast field of musical practices, which is not at all limited to electroacoustic music. What unites the musicians of the GMEA is their resolutely experimental approach, the need to invent new forms, but which can take extremely varied forms. There is something for everyone! Each residency is a world of its own and opens up a field of possibilities: acoustic instrumental music, noise, electronic music, contemporary classical music, performances... Diversity is what makes our approach so interesting. Places that offer artists the possibility of real experimentation are, unfortunately, becoming a rare commodity.

Cow many artists do you have in residence each year?

We welcome about a dozen musicians a year. They come from all over the world, which I think is essential. For the past two years, we have been selecting the residencies through a call for projects, which allows us to have both an international dimension and to make room, also, and this is important, for regional creation. The GMEA has its own record label, for which we have a lot of demand! We have a studio on site, but we also record in mobile studios in different spaces: in an old hydroelectric factory, outdoors, on the river bank... We are lucky to have a permanent sound engineer in our small team: a precious resource for the artists.

Tristan Perich: Open Symmetry (with ensemble 0 + Eklekto) from Tristan Perich on Vimeo.

The GMEA also has its own permanent ensemble of which you are the guitarist, Dedalus.

Dedalus is an ensemble of a dozen musicians, founded in 1996. We have been associated with the centre for five years. The repertoire we work with is devoted to freely-instrumented scores from North American and European experimental contemporary music from the 1960s to the present. These scores offer musicians incredible freedom, much like some baroque music that adapts the work to the circumstances. The musician chooses the instrument or register according to the others. This type of work requires a very precious commitment from the musicians, an ensemble dynamic quite different from what we usually find. We like open scores, as opposed to music that tells everyone what to do and how to do it.

Finally, what are the plans of the GMEA and Dedalus, in this never-ending health crisis?

The core of our activity, the residency, is maintained almost as planned. Fortunately, the three recording projects we have this year are also on schedule. The first one to be released, devoted to the work of the American Tom Johnson, is due in April. It's a project that particularly appealed to the seven Dedalus musicians who took part in it: in this album, we left our instruments in their boxes and we use only... our voices. All we do is count, in about thirty languages, according to different arithmetic systems! It's a music that oscillates between trance and sound poetry, that flirts with ethnomusicology and linguistics. This record is called "Counting to seven" and each track is a tale, recited, sung in African, Asian, Oceanic, Amerindian, Slavic, European languages... The only words we hear throughout the record are "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven", but in several languages.

Tom Johnson and David Sanson : Counting to Seven, Italian version from Collège des Bernardins on Vimeo.

Suzanne Gervais