6 ½ Weeks: Aimée Portioli | Grand River

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 continues that approach by giving a unified voice to endangered species through an immersive archive of beauty, memory, and warning. The installation invites deep listening and positions sound as a bridge between ecology and humanity’s collective responsibility to the natural world.

Aimée Portioli | Grand River, is a Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer based in Berlin. Her music combines ambient, minimalism and experimental composition with complex rhythms and immersive soundscapes. She has released albums on Ghostly International, Editions Mego, Spazio Disponibile, light-years, Tresor and Umor Rex, among others, and develops immersive sound installations in multi-channel and 4D sound. Portioli has performed at the Concertgebouw, Centre Pompidou, Barbican, Sónar and CTM and more. She runs the label One Instrument and explores sound as communication beyond language.

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