The ensuing days of lockdown do strangely also provide time, space and opportunity to explore and expand horizons. To develop skills and experience in new areas, from personal creativity to what you watch, read or, in this case, listen to. If you want to hear music that possesses a sense of calm steady movement, then the music of Eliane Radigue maybe for you.
New musical encounters, for me, are often made through following up leads and connections from previous discoveries. For example, in 2020 I came across the music of Anna Von Hauswoolf this led to investigating on You Tube the avant garde drone pieces composed by Carl Micheal Von Hauswoolf, her Father. After that you can then pretty much leave the rest to You Tube's algorithm to keep throwing 'music you may like' suggestions at you. A few minutes in will tell you if what is being presented interests you or not. This is how I was led to try out the masterfully minimal music of Eliane Radigue.
She's a French composer who has been creating her sustained drone based pieces since the 1950's, these began from exploratory compositions that utilised tape loops of feedback. This early experimental phase took a further quantum leap with the use of electronics from 1970. This progressed, technologically speaking, to using the ARP 2500 modular synthesiser, on which her compositions were entirely made for the following twenty five years.
The orchestrating of these pieces, even when the recording technology improved, must have been incredibly long and arduous. Requiring immense perseverance and patience, just from trying to obtain the best alignment of the tape recorded elements. This frequently would involve starting completely again with the recording, often after many weeks of effort. Not losing your inspiration and confidence during this taxing working method, would have been extremely challenging.
At the debut performance of an new piece called Adnos 1 a group of music students approached her, they wanted to talk with her about her work in relation to Tibetan Buddhism. Over time Buddhist practice and the dharma appears to have become indistinguishably enmeshed within her musical Zeitgeist. Her musical ear developed still closer attention to the slow minute changes in tonal quality within the electronic thrums, spontaneously happening quite fleetingly in the moment. This increased awareness during the process of composition. also reoccurring later in the listener. The gentle arising and meeting of sounds sonetimes continuing over a period of an hour or more. The effect, should you surrender yourself to it, can be mesmerising. The closest encounter in musical form to a meditative practice.
From 2000 she abandoned her use of the ARP 2500 and started to write music purely for acoustic instruments. Though the medium changed, she still drew upon all she'd learnt attending to sound fluctuations when composing through a synthesiser. You might place her compositions within minimalism, electronica or drone, but each of those designations can never quite captures the essence and effect of what you actually hear. The way these soft tonal ossilations and the gentle melding of rhythmic tones can draw you in.
Radigue works within a somewhat geeky musical sub-genre, one often dominated by male techheads. Her gender, the individual uniqueness of her approach and the chosen musical form have contributed to her sometimes being underrated or overlooked for a great deal of her 88 years of musically productive life. Composition for Radigue must then be an act of continual resolve, of devoted love, how else could she persist in making music? Today, when 'drone' based music is having this popular contemporary moment in the spotlight, there may be a chance of a long overdue rise in appreciation for Radigue's altogether unique body of work.
A few pieces by Radigue are available for download purchase. The rest you'll find either on CD, Vinyl record or to stream on You Tube or Spotify.
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