Dimitri Grimm: For Beauty’s Source (ETQ001)
For Beauty’s Source is a recent album from the exception first known as ‘Dimlite’ (2003 – 2013) and then as ‘Dim Grimm’ (2013 – 2023). Perhaps, in this particular case, using the passport name may reflect a final (yet possibly temporary) loss of interest in buzzy, cartoonish alter egos, but the difference is mostly in translation, not spirit, since names aren’t souls, and ‘Dimitri Grimm’ didn’t name himself. It is also worth considering that our creator is the same guy who came up with the platypus. For now though, and for this album and related ones, the name shall weigh and illustrate history just like the others do. Would-be grandpa Grimm per instance was after all a composer of (relatively strange) contemporary classical music, a studied, ‘traditional’ one, who had received lessons from per example Milhaud (another just awful composer the use of whose name shames this entire sentence and effectively renders it dismissable altogether), while just two generations later, Dimitri grew up during the reign of MTV and VIVA, and a (poor) customer in record shops filled with the disproportionally questionable, ‘fresh’ styles and images of the 90s when he began to experiment and teach himself how to make music and started on his 3-stage journey to the present.
Many more bones want to be interpreted into this nomen business, but most often when a person assumes several monikers, a central thread will still show, marking it all as more or less the same music, with perhaps varying attitudes, backgrounds and intents (as can be heard in this mixtape). ‘Dimlite’ and the schools he went to can still be found in how the pieces feel and move, even on this album; and those especially familiar with the Dim Grimm catalogue will already know most of its language. Overall the style of this album is closer related to the original drafts from the Looms project (free download) or what Misel Quitno did on his debut «Sleep Over Pieces» in 2007. A kind of instrumental soundtrackform made with original, greatly detailed and living sonic materials and inherited forms subjected to methods of expanding, inventing, re-interpreting and warping. Sonic and musical exploration that stays within the bounds of a secret dictate.
Since his youth in the 90s, Dimitri freely employs recordings from his direct environment and greater surroundings (it was all Minidisc™️ back then). From the very first record until now, this love and habit has stayed a fixture through-out all of his iridescent career, along with an ever-increasing desire to adapt the music itself aswell to behave more like the reality it comes from – its states, free flow, rhythms, irregularities and physical aspects (such as the shapes, patterns and textures of everything in nature), still within assumed reason and respect to previous records. His discography has for the most part always been a living, reflective, experimental kind of music, some of it with dominant drum rhythms, disrupt, humour and tumult and some without, for and inspired/ruined by his surroundings, travelling, the landscapes and everything that grows and frolics in them. It’s a celebration of life, experience and the overwhelming beauty thereof, oftentimes marbled with a fitting dissonance. And increasingly over the years: visions of a different version of this potential paradise, more appropriate to those actually having to live in it.
Like most of Dimitri’s music from the last 15 years, the pieces on this album were sketched out during unfortunate times, and several unfortunate years later finished in an unfortunate place. They originally came out as a series of orderable, humble ‘musical posters’ between April and August 2023 via prints.dimgrimm.com. The original idea was to release each track along with an animated hologram for these small, once-fancy home projector / playback devices that can be set up on tree house living room tables per instance, but eventually, under the circumstance of no such technology existing and having gotten old and free yet, paper and paint were used.
For Beauty’s Source releases on all digital platforms September 29, 2023. Vinyl delivery will start October 27.