Grüppe
Vinÿle

Listening notes

Grüppe's Vinÿle was released in 2016 on the Tandori label under catalog number TAN036. The record sits at the intersection of several genre designations — avantgarde, experimental, jazz, jazz-rock, math rock, and rock — a breadth of classification that at minimum signals an ambition to resist easy categorization.

The record is spread across two sides with five tracks each. The A-side opens with "La Treize" at four minutes and twenty-two seconds, followed by "La Quatre," the longest cut on that side at four minutes and fifty-three seconds. "La Neuf" and "La Huit" bring the A-side to a close at four minutes sixteen seconds and three minutes forty seconds respectively, with the brief interlude "Le Bonus" — thirty-eight seconds — sitting between them at position A4. It is worth noting that the track titles appear to use French ordinal references to numbers, though "Le Bonus" breaks this pattern with a more literal designation.

The B-side is sequenced differently in terms of duration. It opens with two shorter pieces, "La Dix-Huit" at two minutes thirteen seconds and "La Dix" at two minutes eighteen seconds, before building toward longer material. "La Six" runs three minutes thirty-three seconds, "La Douze" reaches four minutes fifty-one seconds, and the closing track, "La Neuf Bis," extends to seven minutes and three seconds — making it the longest piece on the record and the only one to carry a "bis" suffix, suggesting a relationship to the earlier "La Neuf."

The album title itself, Vinÿle — the French word for vinyl, rendered with an umlaut — appears to be a self-referential gesture toward the format in which the music is presented. Whether that reflects something deliberate about the project's relationship to the medium is not something the available information can confirm. The total runtime, calculated from the tracklist, comes to approximately forty-two minutes and fifty-nine seconds across ten tracks.