Eliane Radigue

[jon abbey]

admittedly a lame reason to start a thread, but we should have one for her anyway and I don't see one...

so I should be able to get some copies of the much-touted Naldjorlak in the near future, as the glacial process to extract copies from Shiiin continues. I'm still not sure of the price, probably in the $25-$30 range, please e-mail me if you want to preorder one so I have a better idea how many to get.

to add some non-capitalist content, Adnos I-III is still my favorite recording of hers, and I wonder if anyone has any update on the status of the piece Halana was supposed to put out, Psi 847:

http://www.halana.com/issue5.html

[eric weddle]

Wonder how much great stuff Halana is sitting on...

Biogenesis was the first piece I heard by Radigue, and still consider it one of my favorites alongside Adnos I-III, which I think is sadly out of print.

Have not heard the reissue dbl CD Songs of Milarepa, feat. Robert Ashley -- how is that?

[will]

Hey Jon, are you only getting Naldjorlak, or are you doing a general Shiiin stock-up? I'm not the hugest fan of Radigue's work, but i really like everything I've heard CHarles Curtis perform.

[Dan Warburton]

This was the piece The Wire published back in October 2005 (#260). Below is what I sent them - there may be a few tiny differences between this and what appeared in print. Apologies for not having the time to go through and italicise all the names of the compositions, as I normally do. It's a bit out of date (she hadn't gone public with the Naldjorlak title at the time, as you'll see) but will give newcomers some background information.
Re: Psi 847 / Halana.. we're still waiting! Anyone live close enough to Ian Nagoski to ring his doorbell at 3am? (Lovely guy, met him in October - excellent musician too)

Into the labyrinth

On a sunny Sunday afternoon at the end of May, the Parisian New Music cognoscenti are gathered in a large, bare and slightly dilapidated ground floor space in a quiet courtyard of Paris’s tenth arrondissement for a rare performance of Eliane Radigue’s 80 minute electronic composition, Psi 847. Four loudspeakers have been strategically positioned in the corners of the room by composer Lionel Marchetti, who also operates the two reel-to-reel tape recorders unspooling the work. The septuagenarian composer, meanwhile, sits unassumingly in the background, and the audience are sprawled on the dusty floor as her extraordinary dronescape reconfigures their minds and redefines the acoustics of the listening space.
Slowly evolving minimal drones and installation works are not so uncommon today, but Radigue was already exploring the potential of site-specific works with feedback and tape loops in the late 1960s. The time lag between the 1973 New York premiere of Psi 847, which helped establish Radigue as one of the most important and farsighted composers of her generation, and its belated Paris performance underscores how her music hasn’t been so much ahead of its time as outside time altogether. For more than 35 years she has been patiently exploring the nuances of psychoacoustics with scant regard for either the fads and fancies of public recognition – the first widely available recordings of her exquisitely filtered ARP synthesizer tones didn’t appear until 1983 – or the conventional idea that a composer’s work evolves logically over a lifetime. Compositions as far apart as 1972’s Geelriandre, released on Giuseppe Ielasi’s Fringes imprint, and 2000’s L’île re-sonante, which inaugurates architect Stéphane Roux’s new Shiiin label, explore similar territory with the same meticulous ear for detail.

Eliane Radigue grew up in the heart of Paris, where she discovered classical music by listening to the radio and taking private piano lessons, graduating from the classics to Satie, Stravinsky and Ravel. But it was only later, after she had married the artist Armand Fernandez, better known as Arman, and moved south to Nice at the age of 19, that she made “the most important discovery: hearing Pierre Schaeffer’s music on the radio, and meeting him shortly after. I can’t remember which piece I heard first, Étude Aux Allures, perhaps. But I associate Schaeffer’s music with Cage, with that freedom to accept that any sound source has its own expressive potential, which can be preserved and enriched to become music. At the time we lived near the airport, and the sound of the Caravelles taking off was superb: such a rich sound mass with an amazing range of harmonics! I’m sure if I’d had access to recording equipment at the time I would have recorded that sound and sent it through my filters. La Musique De Caravelle!”
It wasn’t until 1955 that Radigue finally got access to such equipment, when she accepted Schaeffer’s invitation to work at the legendary Studio D’Essai on Rue de l’Université in Paris. In the early 1950s, though, she was, as she describes herself, “an enlightened amateur”, interested in music in all its forms, from Greek modes and Indian raga to the latest developments in serialism. She devoured books on the subject by Schoenberg and Rene Leibowitz and collected as many scores as she could, notably by Webern, before trying her hand at writing herself – though she prefers to describe her early work as “bricolage”, not having had formal composition lessons. “I suppose I was more interested in the system than the sound,” Radigue says. “I followed the rules – inversions, retrogrades, retrograde inversions – but I was always looking for series with tonal or modal connotations.” She also took harp lessons at the local Conservatoire. “But I was never a good player because I was too emotional,” she avers. “My hands would sweat too easily.”
Deeply involved in the art world with the so-called Nice School – Arman, Yves Klein, Pierre Restany, Martial Raysse – Radigue and her family made frequent trips across the Atlantic and struck up close friendships with the leading lights of Fluxus and Pop Art, as well as Marcel Duchamp, James Tenney, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein and John Cage, but she admits she had no ambition to be a musician as such. “I always thought that was somehow forbidden,” she says. “At the time Arman’s career was taking off, so I let him forge ahead. I had our three children to raise and my priorities were clear. I never referred to my works back then as compositions, either – I called them ‘propositions sonores’.” Unfortunately, few of them survive. “The only piece from the period that I kept, because it took so long to make and I still like the way it looks, is a graphic score from 1960 entitled Asymptote Versatile,” Radigue continues. “I calculated logarithmic curves derived from the Fibonacci series and drew them on transparent paper. If you lay them on top of traditional manuscript paper they can be performed as sustained tones by traditional instruments.”
The score is remarkable for how it reveals the influence of American experimental music. To prove the point, Radigue bustles over to a corner of her flat and pulls out a well-thumbed first edition of Cage’s 1958 Concert for Piano and Orchestra. It also dates her fascination with long duration. Another work, now lost, originated in a game of chess, which Radigue and her husband played frequently with Marcel and Teeny Duchamp. “In French notation the squares of a chessboard are designated by the letters a to h and the numbers 1 to 8,” she explains. “That immediately suggested a musical realisation to me.”
After the breakup of her marriage (though she and Arman are still on good terms, and an extraordinary collection of his artwork graces the walls of her apartment), Radigue returned to Paris, just when Schaeffer’s former colleague, composer Pierre Henry, happened to be looking for a new assistant to help with the realisation of what is arguably his masterpiece, 1968’s L’Apocalypse de Jean. She accepted his invitation enthusiastically. Working with Henry was an intense process. “He even installed equipment in my apartment so I could work at home, preparing short sections of the work – two, three, five minutes – for those marathon mixing sessions at [Henry’s] Studio Apsome,” recalls Radigue. “When we were mixing, there were often three or four tape recorders going at the same time, but Pierre never gave much indication of what he wanted – you had to be on your toes. I almost had to guess in advance what he was thinking, which was wonderful when it worked – but we had some spectacular rows.”
Indeed, by the time the piece was completed, Radigue was ready to go her own way. “I wasn’t going to leave him in the middle of the apocalypse,” she laughs, “but when he asked me to transcribe the whole piece afterwards I refused. But working with Pierre was a wonderful experience, and I learnt so much. He wasn’t in the studio every day, but I was – and when I wasn’t working on his music I had time for my own. My first broadcast work, Jouet Électronique, was realised in the Studio Apsome in 1967.”
Radigue’s use of feedback and tape loops in early works such as Accroméga, Elémental (1968), In Memoriam – Ostinato, Usral (1969), La Noire = 40, Omnht and Opus 17 (1970) – the latter progressively submerging a loop of Chopin piano music – was already far removed from ‘classical’ musique concrète. “Sound engineers avoid feedback like the plague,” she says, “but at the time many composers, especially in the States, were working with it. Feedback for me goes hand in hand with the idea of long duration, for the simple reason that the sounds I was working with were so fragile that I was worried they might break up at any moment.”
One of Radigue’s other feedback loop projects at the time was Σ=a=b=a+b (1969), first staged in Italy in 1970 by Giuseppe Englert and subsequently released as a double 7” with the instruction “to be played at any speed and in any combination”. California based Povertech Special Projects reissued the work in 2000 in a limited edition of 400. Also dating from this period is Labyrynthe Sonore, an open form work in seven parts – “Six, now, in fact, because I swiped one of them for another piece,” smiles Radigue, “I allow myself the luxury of quoting from my own work” – which combines tape loop material mixed with live sound from in and around the venue itself. Cage’s Variations IV is a clear precursor, but the technique has been explored in detail by a younger generation of Radigue’s compatriots, including Eric La Casa, Eric Cordier and Jean-Luc Guionnet. Labyrynthe was originally intended for Expo 70 in Osaka, but was finally first premiered in 1998 at Mills College, Oakland, where Radigue was in residence.
Many of Radigue’s early propositions sonores were performed in conjunction with gallery installations by artists, including Marc Halpern and Tania Mouraud. Back at the end of the 1960s, installation-related work of long duration was in its infancy. One notable early example was the late Luc Ferrari’s Music Promenade, a 1969 installation piece for four tape recorders, though its hilarious montage of out of tune Mexican groups and exploding fireworks was lightyears away from Radigue’s austere minimalism. Like Radigue, though, Ferrari was on good terms with the American minimalists, and he and Radigue enjoyed a close friendship as iconoclastic outsiders. Just as Ferrari’s GRM colleagues were baffled and bemused by the field recordings of his seminal Presque Rien No 1, Radigue’s own Parisian concert debut, the premiere of Geelriandre for tape and prepared piano (played by Gérard Frémy) on 29 May 1972, had a frosty press reception. “They wrote: ‘Nothing happens, and even that’s too much’,” Radigue recalls with much hilarity. Her work wasn’t much better received by her mentors Schaeffer and Henry. “I think my music’s been appreciated more by my pairs [peers] than by my pères [father figures],” she smiles. “I remember some time later Pierre Schaeffer walked out of a performance of Adnos III after ten minutes. And I remember what Pierre Henry said: ‘You were the most gifted assistant I ever had, and look what you ended up doing’."

Drone (n): 1. A continuous low humming or buzzing sound. 2. A long sustained tone

Unlike the droneworks of La Monte Young, Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad, Eliane Radigue’s are not static, but constantly on the move, albeit very slowly and almost imperceptibly. In his 1968 manifesto Music As A Gradual Process, Steve Reich wrote: “Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles: pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; turning over an hourglass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them.” But Radigue’s music is more elusive than the “perceptible processes” Reich advocated with missionary zeal. “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music,” he continued. Change in Radigue’s music, however, is often perceived not as taking place but as having taken place.
“What I always loved in classical music were those moments when a modulation takes place, when the ear is no longer in the preceding tonality but hasn’t yet arrived in the new one. That moment of in between-ness.” Radigue’s music is about extending and superimposing such moments to create a constantly evolving sound mass that plays with our perception of both musical and clock time. “The material repeats, but it also evolves, and that evolution has to be almost imperceptible, so the ear only recognises it once it’s happened.” In short, Radigue, unlike Reich, revels in ambivalence and ambiguity.
When she moved to New York City in 1970, it didn’t take long for Radigue to establish friendly relations with the local minimalists. “I met La Monte Young, Jon Gibson, Philip Glass, and of course Steve Reich. Steve actually introduced me to the people at New York University Art School, where I was in residence in 1971. That was very important, because it was there that I discovered the Buchla synthesizer. It was exactly the instrument I’d been looking for to realise my music; it allowed me to refine my vocabulary, to eliminate everything I didn’t need.” She tested several models available at the time: 1971’s Chryp-tus was composed on the Buchla, while a Moog was used for Arthésis, created later while the composer was in residence at Iowa University. But she eventually fell in love with the ARP, and has worked with it ever since. “I've always preferred the actual quality of the sound on the ARP; it has a stability and quality that's perfectly adapted to the material I work with. I also like the fact I can work with multiple patching and see clearly what I'm doing; I never use the keyboard itself – I work directly with the potentiometers, filters and the dispatching system.” The venerable machine used in almost every composition since 1971’s 7th birth still gleams on her desk in her apartment.
Another minimalist Radigue encountered in New York was Phill Niblock, who heard the Kitchen premiere of Psi 847 and the following year invited Radigue to present a four-day retrospective of her work at the Kitchen’s new space on Broome Street, under the auspices of his Experimental Intermedia Foundation. “The programme included 7th birth and Transamorem – Transmortem, two pieces I’ve withdrawn since, because I think they’re too static, the drones are too stable, as well as Chryp-tus, Arthésis, Biogénésis and Psi 847.” Psi 847 originally premiered in Iowa “to an audience of precisely two people including the Dean of the University,” Radigue chortles. Yet the piece remains a key work in the composer’s output, and one of her longest. “I think it might be too long,” she told a Parisian audience after the work received its ecstatic ovation in May, “but I’m not going to redo it!” However, for the release of Psi 847, still scheduled to accompany the endlessly awaited fifth issue of Halana magazine, Radigue was obliged to make some edits for purely technical reasons (the length of a compact disc).
The world is still waiting for Psi 847, and several other hitherto unreleased Radigue works are due to appear shortly – notably Chryp-tus, still languishing in the vaults at Fringes – but most of Radigue’s post-1973 music has finally surfaced. Biogénésis was released as part of Metamkine’s Cinema Pour L’Oreille series in 1996, and the three works entitled Adnos appeared in an exquisite three CD box on Table Of The Elements in 2001, complete with perceptive and informative liner notes by Rhys Chatham, another composer Radigue befriended in New York.

It was after a performance of Adnos I in Mills College in 1974 that Radigue was approached by three visiting French music students. “They came up to me and said: ‘You do realise that it’s not you creating your music...’ And that suddenly made sense to me. I’d always considered that I was only following the sound, doing what the sound told me to do. I know where I start from and where I have to get to, but it’s the material itself that determines the duration. Well, it turned out they were all practising Buddhists, and since I’d always been interested in oriental thought ever since my early days with Indian classical music, I decided to investigate further.”
Upon returning to Paris in 1975 Radigue visited a centre for Tibetan Buddhist studies and subsequently spent several months a year studying intensively with her master Pawo Rinpoche. “It was the most important experience in my life, and still is. For about four years I was almost a recluse. It was my Tibetan master who brought me back to music, saying that I should consider it as my way of making an offering. So I wasn’t out of circulation altogether.” In 1978 she provided music for Triptych, a ballet by Douglas Dunn at the Ballet Théâtre in Nancy, followed by Adnos II (1980) and Adnos III (1982), the latter a prelude to the series of works she began in 1983 based on the life and teachings of the 11th century Tibetan saint and poet Milarepa. For Songs Of Milarepa, released on Lovely Music in 1983, she called upon the vocal talents of Lama Kunga Rinpoche, who had translated the songs of Milarepa’s Drinking The Mountain Stream into English (but for Radigue’s work performed them in the original Tibetan), and her old friend Robert Ashley. Ashley was the perfect choice: had the texts been read in a more conventional, selfconsciously ‘poetic’ manner, they might have come across as quaintly New Age, but Ashley’s distinctively quirky melodic intonation and deliciously laconic delivery brings them to life with remarkable grace. Radigue continued the Milarepa cycle in 1986 with Jetsun Mila, a cassette only release on Lovely Music, and, a year later, Mila’s Journey Inspired By A Dream. Both the Songs and Journey subsequently appeared as a double CD on Lovely Music in 1998, and a CD reissue of Jetsun Mila is scheduled for the end of the year.
Between 1988 and 1993 Radigue produced three full-length works subsequently issued together as La Trilogie De La Mort on Phill Niblock’s XI imprint. 1988’s Kyema, inspired by the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, was originally released separately, and dedicated to the memory of Radigue’s son Yves, who was killed in a car accident shortly after its completion. “I realised Kyema had to be part of a larger statement, and I started work on Kailasha just a couple of weeks later.” Radigue still describes Kailasha, her imaginary pilgrimage to the sacred Mount Kailash, considered as the centre of the world in Tibetan cosmology, as “heavy, brutal and very difficult... not something I can bear to listen to for long. It’s only rarely been performed, and I even had doubts about releasing it in the first place. I’m hypercritical when listening to my music: I remember exactly how it was made, and I hear only the mistakes. I was ready to wipe Kailasha off altogether and demagnetise my tapes, but before I did so I invited several close friends whose opinions I respected to a private listening session to see if they agreed with me that it should go.” Fortunately they didn’t.
The trilogy reaches its transcendent conclusion with Koume (1993), written after the “great departure” of Radigue’s Tibetan master, which the composer describes as “more peaceful... the experience of a mourning coming to its end.” And if you’re tempted to scoff at that word “transcendent”, prepare to eat your words. Radigue might be almost alarmingly down to earth about her working method, often comparing it to knitting – “slow, patient, knit one, slip one...” – but there’s something ineffably mysterious about the music it produces. However often you listen, you never figure out exactly how it works or why it is so extraordinarily moving.
Another elusive drone grandmaster, Giacinto Scelsi, was adamant that sound was spherical. If that sounds patently absurd, try explaining what happens a quarter of hour or so into Radigue’s L’île re-sonante, when you could swear that the loop of ethereal choral music arrives from way behind and far above the wall of sustained tones it eventually replaces.
Of course, as they say, it’s all in the mix. Radigue’s perfectionism is the stuff of legend. “The final mixes of the longer analogue works had to be done in real time – after working with Pierre Henry, I was an expert at that! – and if something went wrong five minutes before the end, I had to start all over again. But I would often wait, sometimes as long as a month, between mixdowns so I could come back to the sound material afresh. It’s not something I’d do today.”

Recent months have seen two new Radigue releases, L’île re-sonante (reviewed in The Wire 258), and Elemental II (issue 253). This latter was written for bassist Kasper Toeplitz, who worked closely with the composer for nearly two years before premiering the piece at Les Voûtes in Paris in January 2004. And yet Radigue’s score, such as it is, consists of little more than brief instructions accompanied by cryptic diagrams. “It’s more a set of oral indications. We’re working more by osmosis, as it were. It makes no sense to me to specify precise pitches, because I have no idea what they will actually sound like. What Kasper did with his bass and Max/MSP was miraculous, though I don’t claim to understand it. I’m currently working on a piece for [cellist] Charles Curtis, and some of the effects I want can’t necessarily be found at the same pitch depending on which cello he’s playing. It’s up to each musician to find the best way to achieve the result – I don’t care if it’s a quarter tone above or below; it’s not pitch that matters to me, it’s the flexibility of the sound material.” Curtis will premiere the new 70 minute work, whose title Radigue refuses to reveal (“I can have a few secrets, can’t I?”), in December.
A second, slightly shorter performance of Elemental II also took place at Les Voûtes back in January, featuring the laptops of Antye Greie, Ryoko Kuwajima and Kaffe Matthews, aka The Lappetites, a group which describes its work as “a forum, a meeting place, a concept within which to make new music via digital and sonic linking games in remote and local places within a multispeaker playground.” Radigue was subsequently invited to join The Lappetites, and when I speak to her she is eagerly awaiting for her copy of the group’s new Quecksilber release, Before The Libretto. “When they were here to work with me on Elemental II, I gave them copies of Σ=a=b=a+b and some of the pieces from Labyrynthe Sonore. I’m curious to hear what they’ve done with them. You know, most of my life I’ve worked alone, but in recent years I’ve found out how enjoyable it is to work with other musicians,” she admits. “When I was invited to Mills College I had no idea what I was going to do. What could I teach these youngsters who had the kind of musical education and computer skills I never had? They said: ‘Share your experience.’ Well, that’s something I can do.”

[jkudler]

halana issue five in 2004!
We were SO sure number five would make it out in 2003, but that just goes to show what we know. It'd be easy to cite a bunch of excuses -- a tree falling on our house, laziness, trying to grow the perfect tomato -- but the bottom line is we just didn't do it. No problem, though, there's always 2004!

[frozen reeds]

Schoolmap have a sale on, which includes Radigue's Chry-ptus for 12e including postage within Europe...

http://www.schoolmap-records.com/shop/

[jon abbey]

Hey Jon, are you only getting Naldjorlak, or are you doing a general Shiiin stock-up? I'm not the hugest fan of Radigue's work, but i really like everything I've heard CHarles Curtis perform.

happy to order whatever you want, just e-mail me.

[Jesse]

Funny this pops up now, having spent the past three nights listening in the wee hours to Radigue (and citing her work as my most essential desert isle pick).
I sent her a card last month expressing my gratitude for her work, which elicits an improbable sense of both calm and arousal in me. Beautiful sounds. I have told Dan privately I dig his Radigue piece for the Wire.
Adnos I-III and Trilogie de la Morte are the wells I continually return to. I haven't heard Biogenesis and would be rightly grateful to anyone who would send me a burn.
When I first heard the anecdote concerning the Tibetan buddhists who approached her at a concert and reported the links they felt between her music and their meditative experiences, I sort of got it. Radigue and I share Tibetan teachers (she began her exploration of this branch of buddhism following that event). If I were at all prescriptive about music, I'd strongly suggest listening to her to anyone interested in meditation.
I am grateful to Jon who actually gave me my first pointer to her music. I am stoked to hear Naldjorlak, as Curtis is an amazing cellist, surely a great conduit for her compositon.

[faster]

I am stoked to hear Naldjorlak, as Curtis is an amazing cellist, surely a great conduit for her compositon.

I just heard this--it is awesome. Charles Curtis really is remarkable.

[Jesse]

I am stoked to hear Naldjorlak, as Curtis is an amazing cellist, surely a great conduit for her compositon.

I just heard this--it is awesome. Charles Curtis really is remarkable.

You have this one, Joe?

[grisha]

i really need to hear more of her work.

i like Elemental II, which i also saw live in 2006, at the Issue Project. but i think that's all i really heard.

[faster]

You have this one, Joe?

Haha yeah, actually I somehow have two of them. Love it.

[Stephen]

The only ones I have are Jetsun Mila and Chry-ptus, both of which I really like, I should get some more of her work.

Elemental II as recorded by Kapar Toelplitz is great too, I saw this performed by The Lappetites at the ICA a couple of years back and have to say I was seriously underwhelmed by what they did with it, also noticed Radigue herself wincing strongly at one point from behind the sound desk.

The Geelriandre - Arthesis cd on fringes archive was recently put up on the rootblog, I guess this must be long oop now.

[narayan]

halana issue five in 2004!
We were SO sure number five would make it out in 2003, but that just goes to show what we know. It'd be easy to cite a bunch of excuses -- a tree falling on our house, laziness, trying to grow the perfect tomato -- but the bottom line is we just didn't do it. No problem, though, there's always 2004!

I pre-ordered that shit. What a fucker.

[jkudler]

hahah! did you get your money back? nagoski was supposed to do some kind of performance thing or play records in philly recently, but i guess it fell through.

[jkudler]

I haven't heard Biogenesis and would be rightly grateful to anyone who would send me a burn.

is this really unavailable? i can upload later if so. it's a great one. does this work?:
http://idefolococeku.blogspot.com/2008/ ... s-mp3.html

-j.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

so I should be able to get some copies of the much-touted Naldjorlak in the near future, as the glacial process to extract copies from Shiiin continues.

I emailed him 3 days ago and got a reply the day after with the paypal-data. But am I right that isn't a guarantee for a fast delivery if I read this and other posts in other threads?

[Jesse]

For reasons I can't recall, I thought Biogenesis oop, hence the call for a burn. I will research this further.
Thanks for your response, Jesse K.

[jon abbey]

so I should be able to get some copies of the much-touted Naldjorlak in the near future, as the glacial process to extract copies from Shiiin continues.

I emailed him 3 days ago and got a reply the day after with the paypal-data. But am I right that isn't a guarantee for a fast delivery if I read this and other posts in other threads?

sounds that way, yeah.

[Joda]

is this really unavailable? i can upload later if so. it's a great one. does this work?:
http://idefolococeku.blogspot.com/2008/ ... s-mp3.html

-j.

Nope, it doesn't work.

The Geelriandre - Arthesis cd on fringes archive was recently put up on the rootblog, I guess this must be long oop now

Aha! Thanks for the tip. I love this album, but can't seem to find my copy.
Definitely oop.