... As only few other composers, Gérard Grisey was a master at working in these various "altidudes", one who skilfully zoomed back and forth between micro- and macro-time, or, in Grisey's beautiful imagery, between human time and the extended time of whales and the extremely compressed time of insects. and this disposal of time, of the hearing perspevtive - Grisey certainly knew it - affords the music a power that touches on the metaphysical just as the texts of "Quatre chants" do. "Fertilised with time, the music is afforded the power of the sacred of which Georges Bataille speaks; mute and silent forces that invoke and exorcise the sound and its emergence - perhaps and only for a moment. (Peter Niklas Wilson)