ArtistInfo

Derek Piotr
Grunt

Album US 2018 on DPSR label
Electronic and Spoken Word (Noise, Glitch, Modern Classical)

A grunt. That most primal and animalistic of utterances. The new project by Derek Piotr, his eighth solo record and a set of short-form brutalist shards of human-digital noise, is named for this sound. Had Xenakis bought a laptop in 1999, he may have produced something comparable to Grunt and its posthuman #voicenoise aesthetic. Yet this is a wholly unique piece of work. As with Xenakis, Piotr takes recognisably analogue sounds – particularly the voice, but also drawing on acoustic instrumentation and found-sounds from nature – and reconstructs them into 21 intricate ‘electroacoustic’ miniatures. Yet Piotr is less interested in dissolving these boundaries between electric and acoustic than he is in hybridising the organic and the digital. Grunt is subversively queer in its posthuman composition. While there is an undoubted extension of the pulsing soundscapes introduced on 2016’s Drono, the excited percussive joy that drove 2017’s Forest People Pop is present here too. These pieces do not drift or unfold gently, as on Drono. Instead, they animate, collapse and morph incessantly, their shifting mechanics on full display, evoking Dada sculpture or surrealist cinema. With the exception of the final track, a reworked version of ‘Redirect’ by the legendary Kevin Drumm, every piece on Grunt (mastered by the brilliant Stephan Mathieu) is under three minutes in length – amplifying their jarring sonic distinctions.

Musicians

	Derek Piotr voc, US composed by, producer, performer, album by
	Jason Boada , violin
	Kevin Drumm g, syn, *1970 US remix, piano, synthesizer

Producers

Composers

ArtistInfo App

Acknowledgements

ArtistInfo for Mac, iPad, and iPhone