Berlin-based music label Grautag (meaning grey day) was founded by French artist Nicolas Moulin in 2010 as an experimental extension to his visual work, which revolves around desolate cityscapes and wasted landscapes.

Moulin sees the group of loosely connected musicians and artists he attracted over time as forming an undefined “nebula“, or amorphous mass of “grey“, that engulfs its contributors and keeps them from any pre-defined identity. It’s from this zone that they explore the idea of “dystopian landscape music“ and the urban melancholia of “Grautag moments“. According to Moulin: “The idea was to make something cold, but not something cold in a resolute way, not cold in attitude, but something that doesn’t have much happiness or sadness. It is a sort of stoicism in the face of disaster. But stoicism doesn’t mean cynicism, or depression, or happiness. It can be interpreted a bit as a kind of sarcasm, but not especially. We really try to study this Grautag feeling.“ (interview with icrates.org). This Grautag feeling appears when, at a standstill, an emotional or perceived emptiness, or a certain melancholia and disillusionment, detaches you from your surroundings.

Moulin conceptualizes Grautag as a way of dispossessing oneself from the immediacy of events and their demand for response, as if, for example, watching a disaster without the sensation of drama. Moulin focuses on the decentralizing power of landscapes, in which one is integrated as a mere element among others, and where linear time and the anthropocentric perspective are disbanded. As such, Grautag-music can above all be understood as a landscape generator; a form of music that favours space over time, a music that is imaginative and contemplative, a fiction without narration that resonates the inner space of listeners. Or, as Moulin would put it; “A kind of black and white psychedelia produced by that everyday sense of emptiness that can overcome you, where ‘better days’ are definitely an obsolete concept“.

Interweaving Paris, Nice, and Berlin, the “Graunacht“ assembles the complete guild of Grautag artists to perform in various collaborations within a visual environment created by Nicolas Moulin himself.