Ragnar Grippe - Sand

Pitchfork 81

The painter Viswanadhan Velu was born in a small town in Kerala, India, but made his way to Paris around the late 1960s. Following a car accident in Germany in 1976, he returned to India and traveled along the coast, collecting the sand that would form the basis of a new body of work. Viswanadhan’s art—non-representational, but, by his description, not abstract, either—has a searching quality and is broadly concerned with the elemental; in sand, he says, he found “the dichotomy between matter and meaning of being.”

Ragnar Grippe, a young Swedish composer who was trained as a cellist, landed in Paris around the same time, where he studied musique concrète with Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. With the avant-garde composer Luc Ferrari, another figure adjacent to that community, he founded the studio l’Atelier de la Libération Musicale. Grippe, who drew inspiration from a number of the visual artists he met through the Cité des Arts residency, befriended Viswanadhan while the artist was working on his sand paintings. When that series was slated to go on view at Galerie Shandar (home to an eponymous record label that released numerous key minimalist works by the likes of Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young), the composer was asked to write a piece to accompany the exhibition. Sand, released in 1977 on the Shandar record label, was Grippe’s first proper album, and in the four decades that followed, the two-part, fifty-minute composition became something of a cult minimalist classic.

Sand opens tentatively. A variety of sounds introduces themselves over a mechanized-sounding tonal rhythm, including soft whistles, scratchy tape, bells, and fits and starts of electric guitar. It takes several minutes for anything to stick, until a wandering melody pushes respectfully through the gentle chaos. The techniques of musique concrète—represented, in particular, by that recurring mechanical percussive texture, which becomes the backbone of the composition—are foundational; Grippe approaches sound with a sense of curiosity, and without a rush to drive the piece with melody. But as Sand progresses, it develops some sense of narrative absent from the more aggressively abstract work of his GRM colleagues.

Grippe moves at an even keel through a series of sonic landscapes, ranging from futuristic, even proggy organ phrases to melodies rendered in a new-age vibrato. Sand dabbles, too, in the more colorful modes of Grippe’s American minimalist peers, using copious repetition and sometimes edging into psychedelic territory. Part 2 casts aside the base rhythm for a moment in favor of maraca, and other instrumentation remains distinct throughout: a recorder flutters in and out, emerging most purposefully in the loosely-woven final moments. It becomes an anchor as the composition unwinds itself to rest. Grippe’s piece has a strong sense of personality, and its humanity is deeply absorbing. Electroacoustic experimentation needn’t be lovely to be gripping, but here, it’s both.

Images from Viswanadhan’s exhibition at Shandar are difficult to source, as is any anecdotal documentation of how this score matched those paintings, so I’m reluctant to over-determine the relationship between the two, or to speculate how they may have activated one another formally. But the painter’s probing relationship to abstraction—a far cry from, and perhaps a direct rejection of, the Greenbergian quest for purity that characterized the avant-garde that preceded it—resonates in Grippe’s work here. Rather than reconstitute his journey, Viswanadhan used raw material he accumulated along it to create something new. And while Sand doesn’t describe an experience, per se, it hums with experience nonetheless, reveling in a strange sense of discovery.