Grand River^IT

© Kasia Kim Zacharko

Performing under the moniker Grand River, Aimée Portioli is a Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer of experimental electronic music, which she imbues with rich emotional colors. Influenced by minimalism and ambient music, her compositions are at once atmospheric and rhythmically complex, incorporating a wide range of contemporary compositional and production techniques.
Released in February 2023 on Editions Mego, her newest album All Above has been praised as her most ambitious and divergent composition yet. Merging acoustic instruments and synthesizers around profund and mournful piano arrangements, Portioli conjures vivid and complex emotional landscapes.
Besides her studio albums, Portioli has created original sound art installations, namely for Rome’s La Galleria Nazionale and Milan’s Il Pianeta, a project of Terraforma Festival. She also partakes in various artistic collaborations and has performed as Grand River at major international venues and festivals.
Portioli holds a bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Linguistics and Communication of Milan. Her thesis explored the psychology of the communicative function of music in media. Her work today is motivated by similar questions of sound and music as a form of communication that transcends language.

She collaborates with visual artist Marco Ciceri on special A/V performances, as well as on the visuals for One Instrument, the record label she founded that invites artists to respond to a unique creative brief: to create a piece of music using a single instrument.

Grand River’s All Above live show is a deeply moving and immersive experience created and performed with her long-time collaborator, visual artist Marco Ciceri. Drawing unexpected and exploratory paths, the performance leads the audience through various states of being, atmospheric timbres, rhythms and melodies, reflecting the composer’s own journey on the album and on set. Between shifting patterns of light and darkness, smoke and mirrors, Ciceri’s stage design offers an intangible setting for contemplation, inviting the audience to fully embrace the experience and simply let go.