Ragnar Grippe started playing Cello and a recording machine and entered the Stockholm University in 1971, classes in Musicology.
He spent a few months at the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm, under the auspices of former director Knut Wiggen, who taught him to like the possibilites that must be inherent in this new medium, and advise him to join in the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris.
There he was listening to Pierre Schaeffer, "morphologie de sons", testing working, trying the blends and mixes of sound.


"France has good food and wonderful friends, Paris was in the 70’s a cultural center for arts before leaving for N.Y., Stockhausen, Renaud-Barrault, Centre Beaubourg known as Centre Pompidou, Paris was alive. I had met with Luc Ferrari, worked in his studio ALM (Atelier for the Liberation of Music), and composed Situation I on the BIS label and the SAND composition on the Shandar label. Ballet came across since I met the american choreographer Carolyn Carlson, hailed superstar at the Paris Opera. She used « Situation I » for a solo ballet with the late Paolo Bortoluzzi, for a long time hailed solo dancer with Maurice Béjart, and later continuing with a solo career. My attitude was that instrumental music had a tough time to get performed, I wanted to use as much energy to compose electronic or electro-acoustic music, in order to establish myself as a composer.
Through the ballets, later film music since 1979 and radio play in France and Sweden, I got an audience and was in a state of dream, since I had the opportunity to do what I liked most, compose and get paid. Only it did take me a long time to understand that this money was what other people would consider their salary. I’m a slow learner. In 1975 I left Paris for Montreal, studying electronic music at McGill University. Montreal was a place where I felt at home, it’s very similar in size to Stockholm, my native city, I met composers with differnt philoisophical departures than their european counterparts, life is wonderful when there are so many different approaches, Buckminster Fuller, domes and a wireless society were discussed in 1975.
I left Montreal after some 5 months, visited San Fransisco in spring 1976. Gave some lectures at UCSD, San Jose State University and other places, played music at KPFK in Berkeley… Experiencing a completely different approach in North America to the sliced french GRM music. If french music is vertical - time elements one after another - the american music was horizontal, maybe due to an early use of sequencers, enabling composers to use repetitive patterns that went on for ages."



From 1976, he kept working on multimedia projects, scored many films in the 80’s, and composed more modern dance pieces, performed in Paris and in Stockholm with the Cullberg Company ; worked at IRCAM (l’Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) at Luciano Berio’s department for Electroacoustic Music. Music since 1981 has been composed to a large extent with the Synclavier as sound source, while prior to that the ”Buchla” Synthesizer was the mother to most sounds. We are happy to offer three works he believed may adequately represent his art while being connected with our love for analog Electronic music...