Grand River

Aimée Portioli is a Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer who records and performs as Grand River.

Portioli makes experimental electronic music with a cinematic touch. Her work, influenced by minimalism and ambient music, is atmospheric yet rhythmically complex, incorporating a wide range of contemporary compositional and production techniques.

Aimée Portioli learned piano, cello, and guitar, and sang in choirs from a young age. Her professional career began after university when she started working as a sound designer and audio engineer for an Italian radio station, eventually branching out to work as a freelance sound designer and composer with commissions for fashion houses, films, and video games. But it wasn’t until she debuted her music as Grand River that the world was able to hear Portioli express herself on her own terms.

Besides her studio albums, Portioli has created original sound art installations for Rome’s La Galleria Nazionale (“Soundwundertunnel”, as part of the ilmondoinfine exhibition) and Milan’s Il Pianeta (a project of Terraforma Festival). She also contributed her interpretation of a meditation piece for MUTEK’s Soundworks app, and collaborated with Ableton for Live 11.

Aimée 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 goes beyond language.