"Venues that offer artists the opportunity to experiment are becoming a rare commodity".

Did you know? Albi is home to one of France's most active centers for musical creation. Directed by Didier Aschour and his team, the GMEA has seen the likes of great names from France and abroad, without any aesthetic blinkers. Interview.

In the end, the general public knows little - if anything - about GMEA. What do you do?

GMEA stands for groupe de musiques électroacoustiques d'Albi. The center grew out of an electroacoustic music studio founded in the early 1980s. We were awarded the "Centre national de création musicale" label in 2000, and today our name doesn't quite reflect everything we do! Our mission is to bring new music to life and enable it to be produced. We have a whole range of commissioned works and artist residencies, and we disseminate the repertoire with a season of concerts in-house and in the region, as far afield as Toulouse. We also have a festival, "Riverrun", which takes place every year for ten days in early October. Another highlight is "Sound Week", which takes place all over France in the middle of winter, at the end of January, and which we are delighted to take part in. It's a week of workshops, concerts, sound installations and exhibitions all over Albi. Each year, we propose a theme or a portrait of a composer. Unsurprisingly, the 2021 edition, which we had planned to devote to John Cage, has been cancelled. We'll be redeploying our actions at different times of the year. 

Myriam Pruvot on Lhoop, the Gmea program on Radio Octopus

You promote a vast and extremely diverse repertoire, but some would describe it as a "niche" repertoire. How do you promote your artists and their music?

There's no magic formula: you have to reach out to the public, from the earliest age. We're involved in cultural activities in schools, with listening courses for schoolchildren lasting three or four sessions, meetings with musicians in residence... The fact that we're associated with a specific region - Albi, the Tarn - also builds audience loyalty, with curious audiences returning year after year. We defend a very broad field of musical practice, which is by no means limited to electroacoustic music. What unites GMEA musicians is their resolutely experimental approach, the need to invent new forms, which can take an extremely wide variety of forms. There's something for everyone! Each residency is a world of its own, opening up a whole new field of possibilities: acoustic instrumental music, noise, electronic music, contemporary classical music, performances... Diversity is the spice of our approach. Places that offer artists the chance to experiment are, alas, becoming a rare commodity.

Cow many artists do you have in residence each year?

We welcome 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 our residencies on the basis of a call for projects, which gives us both an international dimension and, importantly, a place for regional creation. The GMEA has its own record label, for which we are in great demand! We have a studio on site, but we also record in mobile studios in different locations: in an old hydroelectric plant, outdoors, by the river... We are fortunate to have a permanent sound engineer on our small team: a precious resource for the artists.

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

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

Dedalus is an ensemble of a dozen musicians, founded in 1996. We have been associated with the center for five years. Our repertoire is devoted to free instrumentation scores from North American and European experimental contemporary music from the 60s to the present day. These scores offer musicians incredible freedom, rather like certain pieces of Baroque music that adapt the work to the circumstances. The musician chooses his or her 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 for GMEA and Dedalus in this never-ending health crisis?

Our core activity, residency, is being maintained almost as planned. As luck would have it, so are the three recording projects we have lined up for this year. The first, devoted to the work of American Tom Johnson, is due for release in April. It's a project that particularly appealed to the seven Dedalus musicians who took part: in this album, we left our instruments in their boxes and use only... our voices. All we do is count, in some thirty languages, according to different arithmetic systems! It's music that oscillates between trance and sound poetry, flirting with ethnomusicology and linguistics. The album is called "Counting to seven", and each track is a tale, recited, sung or sung in African, Asian, Oceanic, Amerindian, Slavic and European languages. The only words we hear throughout the album 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