Aimée Portioli
Symphony for Endangered Birds

7-channel sound installation, duration: 28'
Concept, musical composition, sound design, spatialization and installation production by Aimée Portioli

Symphony for Endangered Birds is a new 7-channel sound installation by composer and sound artist Aimée Portioli, known in the electronic music scene as Grand River. The 28-minute looped piece merges field recordings, spatial sound design, and musical composition to create a deep listening experience that is both meditative and urgent.

At its core are the voices of seven endangered bird species - each representing a different continent - brought together in a collective choir of resistance and warning. Their songs speak of fragility and loss, inviting reflection on the rapid disappearance of these species due to deforestation, climate change, illegal wildlife trade, hunting, urbanisation, and bushfires.

Birds play essential ecological roles as pollinators, seed dispersers, and environmental indicators. Their voices are not only beautiful, they are integral to the balance of our ecosystems. Symphony for Endangered Birds captures this vanishing soundscape and transforms it into a call to action.

Through a process of detailed composition, interweaving melody, field recordings, and electronic textures, Portioli constructs a sonic monument to these birds and their complex systems of communication. The result is a powerful meditation on interspecies coexistence and shared responsibility.

A sculptural piece by Federico Gargaglione serves as the visual counterpart to the sound installation: a slender metal structure ending in a suspended, illuminated white feather. It suggests fragility, silence, and weightless resistance - a quiet focal point around which the birds’ voices orbit.

A printed booklet accompanies the installation, featuring drawings of each bird species by artist Brandon Locher. Made with a meticulous dotting technique, the images evoke gradual disappearance, echoing the project’s theme of loss, both in the birds’ songs and their fading physical presence.

This work builds on Portioli’s ongoing artistic exploration of the natural world and its acoustic language. Her previous piece Tuning the Wind transformed wind recordings into layered musical textures, allowing nature itself to become a prepared instrument. Symphony for Endangered Birds builds on that approach by giving a unified voice to endangered species through an immersive archive of beauty, memory, and warning.

The darkened walls and minimal lighting of the exhibition space are designed to heighten the sense of desperation in the birds plight and underscore the finality of their possible extinction. The installation invites deep listening and positions sound as a bridge uniting ecology and humanity’s collective responsibility to the natural world.

For the last decade, Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and musician Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, has been circling the perimeter of electronic music and sound art, crafting heady electroacoustic soundscapes for acclaimed labels like Spazio Disponibile, Editions Mego, Caterina Barbieri's light-years, Ghostly International, Tresor and Umor Rex while simultaneously devising ambitious multichannel installations and rupturing the boundary between the gallery and the performance space. Most recently, she debuted Symphony for Endangered Birds, a 7-channel sonic examination of vulnerable bird species, at Essen's Museum Folkwang.

Inspired by vintage kosmische music, film scores, experimental rock, ambient music and avant classical sounds, Portioli has devised her own unique signature, a vivid and painterly sonic landscape that's viscerally driven by the unconstrained emotional language she developed when she studied as a linguist. Using her advanced knowledge of analog and digital synthesis alongside subtle acoustic instrumentation, Portioli highlights shrouded emotions and complex themes; she crafted an achingly melancholy tribute to Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg on 2023's All Above and in 2024 meditated on the idea of emptiness with Abul Mogard on In uno spazio immenso, an album that Resident Advisor described as "theatrical and emotional ambient with a post-punk edge."

Portioli is set to return to Editions Mego in fall this year with Temporary, her most expansive and focused album yet. Painting over the musical outlines she displayed on its predecessor she meticulously seeks out more nuanced shades, balancing her billowing electronic textures and buzzing arpeggios with vivid melodies and thunderous rhythms. It's surprisingly direct, highlighting the interplay between Portioli's guitar work and advanced synthesizer processes.

In 2025 meanwhile, her ambitious 2022 piece Tuning the Wind was finally packaged as an album for Mexico City's Umor Rex imprint after being performed live across the world and adapted into multichannel, 4DSOUND and stereo installations. Taking environmental recordings and tuning them to 440hz, her organic sounds blended seamlessly with her selection of synthesized elements, raising questions about the nature of sound itself - and the friction between humanity and the natural world.

Her approach is bolstered by the connections she fosters and feedback she receives at her dynamic live shows. Performance is as important to Portioli as the compositional process itself and she's been able to present her work at some of the world's most prestigious festivals, such as Berlin's Atonal and CTM, MUTEK in Montréal and Spain's WOS, appearing at iconic venues such as Paris's Centre Pompidou, London's Barbican Centre and Berlin's Berghain.

Portioli also runs One Instrument, a distinctive label with a singular focus: to prioritize music made using just one instrument. Since its inception in 2016, the imprint has released records from a wide variety of artists, including Felicity Mangan, Donato Dozzy and Morning Seance.

Cover artwork by Federico Gargaglione
Press photo by Alejandro Sandoval Bertín