Vessels of Chaos: Remix Edition celebrates the one-year anniversary of Vessels of Chaos, a double-EP released by French artist Griigg in late 2024 on two labels, MONTAGE and Over My Body.
While the original release explored primitive forms of collective organizations rooted in material reality, through the use of voice and organic noise as source material, this edition invited friends, previous collaborators, and affiliated artists to reappropriate the sonic elements, to reshape them, and project them into new territories and imaginaries. The release welcomes artists from electronic scenes spread around the world, such as Archidi, Bademjan, B E N N, Disektor, HWXXNG, ixqzm, Mélodie Blaison, Melanin, Moxina, Rumina, Sprælle, and W.ANNA.W.
From ethereal soundscapes to club-oriented constructions, harsh textures, distorted beats, psychedelic grooves, and shimmering reflections blend and collapse into new artefacts and prismatic devices, offering new perspectives and anchors in a crumbling lorescape. On this occasion, we conducted not one, but three e-mail interviews around this project. Relax and you can read them below.
First interview with Rumina and W.ANNA.W
How do you balance honoring the original artist’s intent with your own signature sound? Can you describe your process of remixing the song for Griigg?
Rumina: I was mesmerized by the melody in “Tears of the Eternals, Whole” and the whole mood of the track. I built worlds inside my imagination around the track and started humming to it, which then eventually became the vocal element in my remix of the track.
W.ANNA.W: I see my music as something that holds both light and shadow, and for this remix, I chose to foreground the brighter side of my sound. Rather than transforming the track, I focused on reinterpreting elements that strongly resonated with me, especially the flute melody, and rebuilt the structure around them while keeping the emotional core of the original intact.
Did you try to enhance the original emotion of the song, or were you intentionally trying to flip the mood?
Rumina: Initially, I wanted to incorporate war drums in some way to enhance the fantasy feeling of the song, but ended up making a more hip-hop type of beat. They kind of sound like the ones from J-Kwon’s “Tipsy”. It was not intentional; they just happened to sound that way, and I liked the contrast they added to the track.
W.ANNA.W: I wasn’t trying to flip the mood, but to gently shift its emotional center. By keeping the atmosphere lighter and introducing contrast, I wanted to reveal another emotional layer that already existed within the track.
Since this is a full remix album, did you collaborate with the other remixers to ensure a cohesive „world,“ or did you work in total isolation?
Rumina: Since the remixers are spread out across different geographies of the world, it didn’t come to my mind to collaborate. I know about the works of most of the producers and am a fan of many of them. It was also cool to, as a part of the project, discover producers whose work I had not heard before.
W.ANNA.W: Listening to the other tracks made me aware of how wide the range of approaches can be. Each remix seems to bring forward its own perspective, shaped by different places and backgrounds. Rather than presenting a single defined world, the album feels like an open space where different ideas and sensibilities can coexist.
Second interview with GRIIGG
With this remix album, you wanted the artists to reappropriate the original sonic elements, to reshape them and project them into new territories and imaginaries. Can you tell us more about how you imagined shaping the project?
The tracks of the original release started a few years back, when I tried to change my creative process for something much more spontaneous. The initial idea was to use my own voice and noises of different sorts as main source materials, as well as exploring the beauty of imperfect, rough, and grainy sounds. After some unconstrained exploration of ideas, the intentions became a bit clearer. This is probably my favorite step, when I listen to all the demos, tests, misfits… and see how they can connect together to create something coherent and interesting.
Out of this phase emerged the idea of a double EP, which explores complementary directions with a similar structure, where I imagined how these sounds could serve as ritualistic artefacts for primitive forms of collective organizations, small tribes, and communities in an undetermined future, and their transformative power.
This approach and the development of the associated lore really helped to guide the production process. Celestial Tears, the more ambient one, would focus on shimmering sounds and ethereal matter, finding serenity in the infinity of the cosmos. And Mercurial Blood, the club-oriented one, would focus on rough textures and fractured rhythms, for a worship of friction as movement, rocky materials, and abrasive shapes. The seven tracks of each EP would then serve as different steps of an alchemical process, where the characters would distill the corresponding materials to craft spiritual prosthesis, making kin with matter to redefine their relationship to the world.
For the remix edition, I wanted to celebrate the anniversary of the release and explore these themes that emerged in the process in a collective manner. I was really curious to see which intentions would be retrieved in the remixed tracks, and which aesthetics would come out of it. Just like the lore, it’s a form of distillation, observing what is left once passed through the filter of a group::)
How did you choose the artists for remixes? What was the main element that was important in their music?
I think the most important aspect was to feel a sense of depth in their music, an open exploration of emotions, and an expression of their inner selves. And obviously, I was also looking for some aesthetic affinities, whose music I really loved: the way they could craft ambient soundscapes and harsh textures, their use of flute instruments, or their care for sound designs and rhythms…
I contacted a selection of previous collaborators, as well as some artists connected to the involved labels and friends in my personal surroundings, trying to have diversity in the different interpretations and reappropriations that could happen.
You talk about lorescape. Can you elaborate more on this? What does it mean?
It’s a concept I try to put at the core of the Griigg projects, which helps with two aspects. First is the idea of speculative soundscapes, where sound and fiction coexist. I like to explore how given elements of an imaginary situation would sound, and how, in return, these sounds can influence the fictional elements. I’m really fascinated by the transformative power of fiction, how its capacity to project us into a different world can actually manifest in everyday life in the way it changes our own perception and internal thinking, how it can reshape our mind and practices.
I also see it as a keyword for a set of practical tools in my creative process, where narrative design is used to develop an idea or project, for example, by associating a character with a set of instruments. It’s something I’ve started to document over the past years through articles, workshops, and teachings.
This vision helped a lot with most of my releases, where each project would connect with other ones through a shared lore. For example, Vessels of Chaos connects to the Interbeings EP release of 2019. While Interbeings was focused on collaboration and setting up new values to evolve in a crumbling world, allowing us to dream about potential ideas, Vessels of Chaos would focus on the more concrete aspects of this world in a distant future, its material reality, and newly rebuilt primitive communities. It’s also something I developed in collaborative projects, such as with The Great Sleep and After the Flash: SD Cards, two radio residencies organized via Club Late Music and the Global URL Nation, where each mix would be paired with a short novel. Some elements and concepts are shared through all these projects, and for me, it helps to associate them with some sounds, textures, or processes.
Were you inspired by some fantasy world-building works of art? This project reminds me perhaps of J.R.R. Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons.
Obviously, I’m influenced by many fictional worlds and stories, including some fantasy books, movies, and games. But fantasy was just a partial influence. Quickly enough, I wanted the release to explore a paleofuturist universe, a kind of post-collapse low-tech distant future, where techniques and technologies are just obsolete remnants of our time, artefacts with no use. As I was developing the project, a lot of inspirations helped to shape the sounds, aesthetics, concepts, and world of the release: from solarpunk memes and the cryptic illustrations of the Codex Seraphinianus, the crystal photographs of Roger Caillois, antiquity cosmogony and panpsychism, to Daoist philosophy, Dona Haraway’s idea of making kin, or the CCRU writings.
Can you tell us about creating the merchandise? It looks like a magical potion from a medieval fantasy, very unique!
For the original EPs, we collaborated with Alice Trescarte and Barbara Leclercq for the covers. Two ceramists we really admired for the atemporal aspect of their work. Alice is more focused on objects with raw materials and shapes, while Barbara creates chimeric sculptures that relate to bodies and mutations. Their work really helped to define the formal aspect of the release and its visual translation, digested through the prism of 1.5L (co-founder of Graphis Scripta), who worked on the covers and visual assets of the original release.
The visual language expanded when turning this project into a live format, as I started to create small artefacts I could use to create sounds in live and process them with guitar pedals. When working on the remix edition, with Graphis Scripta, we wanted to continue this exploration by focusing on small objects that could be part of the lore. Romain Kloeckner was a ceramic artist doing exactly that, so we collaborated together on these flasks. I think each object or visual asset played an important role for the release. It’s like a little manifestation of the lore in our own reality, kind of like a little sneak peek that helps to feel its energy and grasp its influence.
Graphis Scripta is described as a „laboratory of hybrid fermentations in the liminal zone. Music, publishing, craft, and tech intertwine. Chronicles of a future-past from the rural margins.“ How did you collaborate with them? What was the creative process in finding the link between your music and physical objects?
The structure is newly launched, but we already worked together on my last few projects. The interaction is very smooth, they have original ideas and professional workflows, and they know my intentions and tastes very well. It was good timing for both of us, because they were launching the structure at the same time I was initiating the remix edition – a good opportunity for both of us to try this process of bridging art and crafts.
We both give great importance to rituals and the power of anchoring objects, which can reshape our psyche and reality when given enough importance. We wanted these objects to have this power – serving as a perfect bridge between fiction and reality.
Third interview with GRAPHIS SCRIPTA
Can you tell us more about what we can expect in the future from Graphis Scripta? What projects do you want to release?
As Griigg mentioned, we’re officially launching Graphis Scripta with a clear intention: to bring forth anchoring projects – creations rooted in anchoring rituals designed for and by the artists we work with. The anchoring manifest is both in the choice of materials and in the lore developed around each project. This pursuit of depth guides our approach. The year 2026 will be marked by several significant releases: DUB&DUBBER’s debut album, as well as a musical compilation conceived as the OST for the second volume of GOGOPLATA by Sophie Couderc. Graphis Scripta isn’t limited to being a music label. We position ourselves as a creative laboratory where artistic practices and methodological reflections intersect.
Our „Aventure Technique“ program continues with a second edition, welcoming Robin, a game designer who also runs a permaculture project. Together, we’re supporting the materialization of one of his board games using sustainable and local materials, working in collaboration with local artisans. This residency embodies our desire to explore how music, tangible objects, and alternative formats can become genuine vectors of collective reflection and knowledge transmission. We are lucid: operating off-grid doesn’t automatically ensure economic viability. That’s precisely why we’re opening cycles of workshops and residencies for artists and designers wishing to immerse themselves in our space. We provide space to work and exchange, where we delve deeper into questions of methods, workflows, and creative organization: How to structure one’s practice to embody their projects? How to identify and cultivate one’s niche? How to sustain one’s creative ecosystem?
These questions fuel our daily reflection. Depending on the needs, the support can take the form of discreet, exploratory incubations or public residencies with collective presentations. We’re also actively seeking structures or foundations interested in these explorations and willing to support and collaborate with us (for any inquiries, please contact us through our website).
For a decade, Griigg has been capturing the aesthetics of creation while meticulously documenting methodologies, whether individual or collective. We deeply share this conviction: today more than ever, it’s necessary to map and transmit approaches that allow maintaining creative agility without sacrificing the depth and rigor of projects.
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✱ Questions: Krištof Budke / You can follow Griigg here and Graphis Scripta here ✱
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