Meirino, Francisco

Meirino, Francisco

A New Instability

Helen Scarsdale Agency

In 2019, the power-acoustic musician Francisco Meirino presented A New Instability a commission for the venerable Ina-GRM in paris. Of course, this institution is the pre-eminent center for the research and study of electro-acoustic music dating back to founding of Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. To this day, Ina-GRM continues to be at the vangarde of the electro-acoustic composition, and it is quite an accomplishment and very appropriate for Meirino to receive such a commission.   This recording for A New Instability condenses the 32-channel original piece down to a still very active stereo version. here, Meirino continues to amplify and refine his compositions that walk a fine tightrope between raw expressivity of brutalist noise and conceptual rigor of more academic pursuits. Such a work ranks him in with the likes of Zbigniew Karkowski, Dave Phillips, Puce Mary, and Illusion Of Safety.   Field recordings from a kendo dojo in his hometown of Lausanne, Switzerland cast a pugilistic, combative arch to these recordings which snap, burst, explode, and erupt with utterances of men and women engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Searing frequencies build, swarm, and amass out of these episodes rise to psychologically tense crescendo that rupture at their heights, quickly turning attention towards a violence that originates from within. It is as if the objective observations of those martial arts recordings are sublimated within a subjective experience of psychic unease, disquiet, and imbalance.   A New Instability is another magnificent chapter in the...

Meirino, Francisco

Surrender, Render, End

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***First and foremost, Surrender, Render, End is an electro-acoustic dialectic, unremittingly engaged in a pugilist conflict between art and accident. The Swiss noise-composer FRANCISCO MEIRINO began working on the skeleton for this piece in 2014 as a multi-channel, modular synth patch, which has been in an ongoing state of modification through public diffusions and private rumination. Meirino posits the album as a metaphysical puzzle of manipulated tape, atonal synthesis, and concrete sound. He is quick to point out that these are more than field recordings, better stated as an extreme amplification of natural phenomena. All of this twists and turns through a shifting of perspective, akin to the cinematic tropes of objectivity and subjectivity in the framing of the image; but here it is with hostile topography of sound interacting with the human mind, body, and spirit. The allusions within Surreneder, Render, End are numerous and for the most part are fleetingly abstract, like the fragments of a nightmare that linger days after. The research laboratory, abandoned with all of the instruments running after an experiment became toxic and started to metastasize. Nerve-endings rupturing from sensory overload. The residual psychic violence of a time and place that's forgotten history. The one recognizable human utterance: "I'll never know anything." Meirino's work has long been at the forefront of sonic exploration, with Surrender, Render, End being a masterful work built upon many years of dedication to his craft, with countless performances, residencies, collaborations, and publications. Think Luc Ferrari, Peter Tscherkassky, and the...