Eliane Radigue - At the Impermanent Heart of Sound

Where is the changing point?

but the means which permit the realization of the possible.

[Anonymous]

Milarepa, the medieval bard and ascetic who according to Tibetan tradition composed over a hundred thousand songs on the precepts and practice of dharma, was asked during one of his many pilgrimages to intone a short poem on the essence of the mind and on how to confront the arising of its objects. The saint reviews a series of images illustrating the Buddha's doctrine, among them the relationship between air and mist and that between sky and clouds. The most effective symbol, however, taken up from the words of the Enlightened One, is that of water. The water of a river as a reference to the eternal impermanence underlying every aspect of being. The still water of a lake as a metaphor for the mind in its purest state, upon which the waves of ideas and thoughts ripple, though made of the very same substance.

The solution lies in letting the wave go. Reining in all effort. Breathing the moment. Thus, purged into a new state of awareness, paying very, very close attention, beyond the most superficial perceptual crust, we might almost be able to make it out without the aid of any shell: the sound of dharma: a subtle but persistent sound, a constant ebb and flow, with no clear beginning and no defined end.

The minimalist season is, among all of them, the one that flirted most with the vision and metaphysics of the sage sitting beneath the Bodhi tree. More specifically, it's the exponents of that sub-current, which we'll conventionally call dronic, who lent themselves as a physiological vehicle on the labyrinthine path out of samsara. Among them, Eliane Radigue is the figure who holds absolute authority as a refined psalmist of dharma, interpreting it in a form of pure, discreet sonic poetry that takes its cue from the French "concrete" school to build her own deeply personal sonic universe, eventually transforming Schaeffer's engineering insights into long meditative sessions poised between trance and transcendence.

A brief history of avant-garde and spirituality.

At the court of Parisian concretism

Eliane Radigue was born in 1932 in a Paris — and a Europe — that literally no longer exist. The daughter of merchants from Les Halles, a lively medieval market district torn down in 1971 to make way for a modern shopping and museum complex, the girl's upbringing was immediately marked by pressing sonic input. The classical music heard at home from her parents would remain by far the most overwhelming memory, a presence disowned for many years and recognized as a decisive influence only in hindsight ("Deep down, I realize I never truly freed myself from that world," she recently confessed). What she appreciated in classical music were the slow movements, the adagios, the subtle key changes that threaten an established equilibrium without yet having outlined the new order. This is a structure that, on closer inspection, can be found at the heart of every one of her compositions, as well as in her general artistic outlook and design. An even more decisive influence would be another kind of music, the one that came in through the window, the one she crossed through every time she went out onto the street: the wonderful, incessant noise of the Les Halles markets, the shouting and calling of vendors, tourists, and Parisian vivre. Eliane soon learned that noise is existence, and that music is just one of the ways to master and codify it in the service of the senses and perception.

Eliane came to music in her teenage years, following what was more or less the obligatory path of the time — the study of classical music, focusing in particular on the harp and piano, though without developing much enthusiasm for it. Her interest then naturally began to shift toward other approaches: it was while listening to a program on RTF radiodiffusion that she first learned of Pierre Schaeffer's experiments.

The founder of the Studio d'Essai had already been working for some years on radio archive material, manipulating noises recorded on disc using multiple gramophones (this is how the seminal "Etude aux chemins le fer" was born in 1948). In 1951 the studio introduced the use of tape, a medium that allowed material to be worked and cut up with extreme precision.

The twenty-year-old Radigue, frustrated in the meantime by a complicated relationship with the French-American sculptor Arman (with whom she had moved to Nice and had three children), decided to turn things around without wasting any more time: she left her partner and the study of "traditional" instruments behind and got in touch with Schaeffer, who gladly invited her to attend the Studio d'Essai to learn the techniques of musique concrète.

In those years the Studio d'Essai continued to attract eminent figures from the avant-garde and microtonal studies, from Pierre Boulez to Luc Ferrari and Iannis Xenakis. However, her most frequent visitor and collaborator would be Pierre Henry, who immediately spotted Eliane's potential and in 1955 took her under his wing as his assistant, also providing her with her first tools for the work: three tape recorders, a mixer, an amplifier, and a microphone.

The conditions were all there for the development of a new, scientific-serialist mindset, but Eliane soon chose to row vigorously against that current (she would later describe serialism and twelve-tone music as "arid and unsatisfying"). What interested her instead was a very specific timbre, a line through which she could find and engage with her own inner sonic flow. At this stage, she immediately identified that quality in feedback — an acoustic effect that thrilled her, not just for its sound but for its behavior, for the exciting and unpredictable results that the physiological flaws of the equipment in use at the time could produce.

Eliane worked with determination toward this end, trying to unpack the expressive potential of feedback — the so-called "Larsen effect," but also dismissed in the scene as mere "sonic garbage."

Her first compositions came to life in the second half of the 1960s, split at this stage between domestic conceptual experiments and works commissioned by outside artists of various backgrounds. The first group includes the two short compositions credited as Radigue's earliest works, left forgotten in the archive for several decades: Jouet Electronique, from 1967, a work marked by the boldest experimentation with feedback, and Elemental I from the following year, her first attempt to place her experiments within a conceptual framework (in this case, the four natural elements interestingly simulated through tape cut-up mixing techniques).

Larger and more substantial, however, was the body of work conceived as environmental music. These were primarily sonic accompaniments to installations and audiovisual works, born out of contact with multidisciplinary artists like Marc Helpern and Tania Mourand, or, more rarely, standalone compositions aimed at creating "sonic spaces."

The first example in this vein is the pièce Usral: first presented at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs alongside one of Marc Helpern's sculptures (a glass block with moving elements inside it and two speakers embedded at its base), the work is a bleak assemblage of feedback at various frequencies, favoring the higher tonalities, including an unprecedented experiment with ultrasound. The same structure also lies at the core of the roughly contemporaneous Omnht, created for the architectural installation "One More Night" at the Gallery Of The Rive Gauche in Paris and made up of looped feedback at both extremes of the spectrum: an extremely low, rumbling pattern acting as a visceral rhythm, and extremely high-pitched cues opening up perceptual spaces of superhuman scale.

Eliane Radigue's music thus presents itself as conceptually ever more distant from the concretism that gave birth to it, taking shape ever more clearly as "flow," as meditative space and stasis, in an increasingly precise and selective play of tonalities built on the fatality of "micro-sounds" that bypass the ear.

These early bold experiments with feedback mark Radigue's conceptual move toward the American avant-garde, where she would find several notable friends (including Frederic Rzewski, Rhys Chatham, and the other Lady of drone, Pauline Oliveros). At the same time, though, they marked the definitive break from French concretism, with Henry's reaction later recounted by the artist herself in her increasingly frequent retrospective interviews: "The first time Pierre Henry happened to hear what I'd started doing, he was furious. He said I was talented and that I was wasting my gift — he had hoped to turn me into an obedient disciple."

Eliane, on the other hand, still follows her instinct, which will lead her quite naturally towards New York, where she moves at the end of 1970.

Form depends mostly upon reflection;

that makes the moon appear round like the sun.

[Inayat Khan]

ARP and the like: psychoanalysis at the synthesizer

An illegitimate offspring of German electronic thought combined with the heterogeneous minimalist wing, the American avant-garde of the late Sixties is also a story of invented electronic instruments, among which the Moog would be destined for the most lasting glory, thanks to the fertile ground it found in pop-rock circles, in its more "user friendly" reincarnations.

In 1966 Morton Subotnick commissioned the construction of an instrument that would concentrate the functions of the bulky electronic studios then in use into a single, more practical device. Donald Buchla came up with a machine – which would bear his name – shaped like a mini-organ set in a wooden frame, without a keyboard and with three analog sequencers. Although it never enjoyed the fortune of other parallel experiments (though it would be appreciated by certain heavy-psychedelic acts and by the Grateful Dead), the instrument was produced in various series up until the mid-Seventies.

Eliane Radigue came into contact with the Buchla 100 during a visit to Morton Subotnick's studio, and immediately recognized the affinity between her "inner sound" and this new generation of instruments, simpler to master and to control in their parameters.

Her first composition for synthesizer is therefore Chry-ptus, from 1971, which also stands among her boldest experiments ever. Recorded at New York University in two movements of twenty minutes each, Chry-ptus is conceived as a game of yin and yang in which the two compositions are meant to be performed simultaneously but synchronized at will, resulting in a double-track operation between two pulsing, deeply dark drones, which nonetheless resolves, once objectified, into a surprising polyphonic embrace, virtually different every time.

Her only composition for the Buchla, Chry-ptus would remain forgotten in the archives for more than thirty years, until between 2001 and 2006 Radigue returned to it with a revisited version of the two pieces, finally published alongside the originals in 2008 on Schoolmap.

Many musicians have developed a bond of complete connection with an instrument, to the point of making it an indispensable artistic extension of themselves. Few, however, have sustained that symbiosis for several decades in a relationship of near-absolute exclusivity. Eliane Radigue is among them, and the love affair began with the proverbial thunderbolt, in 1971.

It's an extremely emotional relationship, the one I established with the ARP. Probably at some point one also needs this kind of bond for the work to really function. Weighing up all the options on the table in terms of synthesizers, the ARP was the obvious choice, a magnificent instrument, with an extraordinary range of filters. I also decided to deliberately forget about the keyboard, so as to have direct contact with the potentiometers, without convenient standardized shortcuts.

The ARP2500, conceived by its inventor Alan Robert Pearlman as a refinement of the Moog and Buchla systems, which he considered unstable and impractical, was indeed, on a technical level, the best thing on the market at the time. With twelve modules and two side wings allowing for extensions of up to six further modules each, the ARP2500 was the first synthesizer to do away with the tangled system of cables and patch cords in favor of a clean front panel controllable via matrices; it considerably improved the analog oscillator and sequencer system and refined the filter array. Following the Moog's model, several keyboards could also be connected to the instrument. An advanced, reliable and extremely precise instrument, of which only a hundred units were ever produced, it was ultimately outsold commercially by the success of the Moog Synth.

Radigue completed her first experiments on the ARP between 1972 and 1973. The conceptual double album Geelriandre / Arthesis is to be considered the first official building block in the completion of the Parisian composer's personal sound aesthetic.

Geelriandre, the first and in some ways still tentative approach to the ARP2500, brings to light what would from now on be the defining trait of Radigue's thinking: a layered, extremely subtle flow, apparently motionless yet rich in timbral nuances, in continuous, chronic mutation. A music that is never fully grasped, and that lends itself more to experience than to mere listening.

Premiered at the Teatro della Musica in Paris, Geelriandre would, however, find its definitive form only a few years later, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where Radigue – in one of her very rare live performances on the ARP, since she would usually choose to stay behind the scenes during performances of her works – decided to present it together with Gérard Fremy's prepared piano, in an acoustically richer version, with piano touches resembling the reverberations of bells, towards a suggestion that for the first time seems to invoke the mystical.

Profoundly different in its sonic makeup is instead Arthesis, a one-off piece by Radigue on the Moog, presented at the University of Iowa. The pièce is an estranging duet between two unsettling streams on parallel channels – a high-pitched frequency oscillating on the right, a lumpy, very low vibration on the left – which flow, merge and swap roles until reaching the most absolute disorientation. Despite the heavy load of technical meticulousness, even faced with instruments that are ultimately ill-suited to the task, the logic of this music instead calls for a total absence of judgement, an even-handed yet attentive letting-go amid the inputs of sound and the responses of the environment, physical and above all psychic.

The relationship with the ARP reaches full maturity, however, only with the formidable triptych released the following year, a 1974 lived in a state of grace.

Biogénésis would be one of the first of Radigue's works to be released on record (arriving, however, several years after its premiere), and ranks among her relatively more accessible compositions, helped also by its shorter duration. Biogénésis takes its cue from the scientific-philosophical concept of the same name, whereby a biological structure or a new organism can only arise from another, pre-existing form of life, and never from biologically dead matter or, even less, from purely technological intervention. Starting from this premise, Eliane creates a "clinical", tense piece, with ARP modulations and a tape of a human heartbeat played at diverging speeds, as if to suggest its belonging to different vital cycles. The law of biogenesis, precisely, but also a symbolic expression of the peculiar "flowing" form of Radigue's art, music that never asserts itself as a monolithic, self-contained entity, but which instead seems to be born from sonic substrata unfathomable to the untrained ear, while still letting its features be glimpsed in its entrances and (apparent) exits, in its continuous, imperceptible mutations.

Eliane Radigue is, meanwhile, a name increasingly affiliated with New York minimalist circles. An entirely physiological mutual attraction that is crowned by a performance at one of the scene's historic venues, the Kitchen, at the time under the direction of Rhys Chatham.

On March 9, 1974, Eliane performs the composition that marks her definitive crossing into electronic drone, as well as one of her longest works ever.

Transamorem – Transmortem presents itself as a genuine sound installation, for which Radigue suggests a specific setup to better experience the concept behind the work. Four speakers placed in the four corners of an empty room. A rug in the middle. A line of faint white lights on the walls, arranged so as to meet at one precise point in the centre of the room.

Once again, in truth, just another indication suggesting that what is about to be performed is not a musical piece but a perceptual space, influenced by and open to influencing the listener's movement and shifts within the physical environment, as well as by brain impulses.

Transamorem – Transmortem is thus a sixty-seven-minute tape, a continuous flow that is only apparently static. Immersing oneself in this current, at once so fine and so unsettling, one will begin by distinguishing the complex multiplicity of inputs at work. With a further sharpening of the senses, those same inputs reveal themselves to be precariously inconstant and, in turn, sub-structured. Then the slightest shift of focus or of one's position relative to the sound source will be enough to find oneself retracing the process in reverse and starting all over again, with matter that has suddenly, mysteriously changed, becoming thicker, sharper or broader, depending on one's level of consciousness, awareness, or simply the positioning of one's ears, in a continuous, unceasing acoustic-molecular becoming, between life and death, between sub-atomic death and love.

Resurfacing from this intense psychoanalytic experience, one discovers what is in fact the indirect effect such a process leads to. The entire environment will begin to sound, to flow, to hum differently, from archetypal sounds to drilling noises, to the point of perceiving the "vibrations of neon" and all those subtler frequencies previously ignored. Silence has been unmasked, annihilated, in an operation that poetically embodies the conceptual legacy of John Cage.

Eliane Radigue's music, unofficially filed under minimalism, increasingly takes on a magnetic, personal character, an art with no immediate parallel, even within the context of the American avant-garde, a vehicle and expression of other meanings, which we shall provisionally label "mystical".

Radigue's work on the ARP2500 likewise grows ever more analytical, reaching deep into its most unfathomable acoustic-expressive capabilities, of a startlingly arcane quality, as if the composer's inner flow transferred itself to the machine through some natural telesthetic process.

Adnos I is the first impressive milestone in this and other respects. The work, among the most refined in the artist's archive as currently known, is the first of a trilogy that for the first time consciously alludes to an introspective-spiritual dimension, a sort of journey towards the elementary structures of the self and, from there, towards knowledge of the One. A dimension announced programmatically also by the cryptic quotation given in the presentation of the pièce: "moving the stones in the course of a river does not influence the course of the river itself, but can at most only alter the play of waves on the surface".

The work, stretched across a monumental seventy-one-minute flow, reveals the extraordinary mastery Radigue had by then achieved over her trusted instrument, bending it with ease to a severe modus operandi predetermined from the outset, only then to reverse roles and let herself be guided by its language, as if the composition had mysteriously taken on a life of its own.

Adnos I thus presents itself, first and foremost, as a patchwork, exemplary of the compositional model Radigue would follow from this point on. Eliane first determines the work's overall duration, then immediately divides it into sections of variable but roughly homogeneous length. She then establishes their different rhythmic and tonal qualities and the ways of transitioning between them. Once the mental draft passes into the hands of the ARP and the tapes, the only guiding principle becomes instinct and the emotional current the composition will arrive at through its own intrinsic laws. The final phase, the most complex, is the mixing, strictly manual, between the sections and, once again, between these and the artist's "inner sound", in an intense process of symbiosis often drawn out and weighed over several months, if not years.

The different scale of Adnos I can be detected right from the first minutes: the sound is rich, layered, its complexity revealed this time with little preamble. The ear recognises a given key and tonality (in this case around A) only to lose itself observing the many inputs at work at the extremes of the spectrum (effects bordering on ultrasound, a very low frequency close to pure vibrato) and the generous spaces granted by the overtones, often a genuine structure within the structure, in an electrifying spell of Chinese boxes. At a certain point, amid this sensory disorientation, it will feel natural to cling once more to the note identified at the start, only to realise that it has now shifted into something close to an E, revealing to the neophyte listener the reality and intentions of this dimension: everything is in constant, unstoppable flux, the changes imperceptible for the slowness with which they occur, for the impossibility of pinning them down within the ongoing outer flow or within the premonitions of new impulses taking shape, but above all for the inevitable process of attachment that the ear, circumstantial ambassador of the broadest, most deeply human subconscious impulses, will vainly try to establish with familiar sounds and structures, or ones that only seem codified.

Tanha. Anatta. Anicca. In some way it was all already written here, as if the controls of filters and oscillators were being guided by the survival instinct of a previous incarnation, simply waiting to manifest itself in order to arrive at a higher state of awareness in the reality of the present.

Enthusiastically embraced by the minimalist circle, particularly by the drone current then led by Alvin Lucier and Robert Ashley (with whom Eliane would strike up a long and beautiful friendship), Adnos I was first presented at the Festival d'automne in Paris in 1974.

It is, however, during a subsequent performance in New York that the same pièce would become the protagonist of an episode that proved crucial for the composer's artistic and personal future. At the end of the performance, Eliane is approached by some French students who, commenting on the piece, mention how her work induced a meditative experience and explicitly ask her "where it came from," since it surely could not be her who composed that music. Eliane is deeply struck by this ("Ah bon! — she would later recall — the first time, I was also surprised by the definition of my work as 'minimalist'. To me it's simply music that comes from the heart, and whatever story it might tell can only be the listener's own story, a process that is in any case very intimate").

Eliane nonetheless stays on to talk at length with the students about meditation and Buddhism, until she gets the address of the Tibetan Studies Center based in Paris.

A few weeks later, Eliane Radigue returns to France, and one of her first visits is to the Tibetan center itself, an institute-space of the Karma Kagyu lineage, which she would go on to frequent regularly and soon become a student of the Tibetan guru Pawo Rinpoche.

On this extraordinary journey of inquiry, Eliane would devote all her energy to the practice and teachings of the Tibetan tradition, severing every tie with music and the outside world and disappearing without a trace for several years.

Do you know how to cope with thoughts?

Try to see the versatile clouds – Yet from sky they are not apart,

Try to see the waves of the sea – Yet from sea they are not apart.

Try to see the heavy thick fog – Yet from air it is not apart.

Thus the frantic runs in nature.

Yet from nature it is not apart.

[Milarepa, Songs About Meditation & Mahamudra]

Drone-poetry at the threshold of perception

Four years of total detachment and disenchantment pass in this way. Four years in which she finds herself torn between enthusiasm for the spiritual realization she has achieved — a state compared to which "music and everything else were entirely empty and meaningless" entities, and during which she more than once thought of getting rid of her instruments and her beloved ARP — and that persistent music which, deep down, never stopped playing in her mind.

A situation Radigue would later recall with her usual clarity and self-deprecating humor: "In many meditation techniques, those who have reached higher levels of awareness often find themselves with a feeling of complete oneness with the whole of creation, for which they feel an infinite love that dissolves the polarity between self and other. The guru Pawo Rinpoche was one of these, and at a certain point he came to think that the poor Master was clearly having to put up with this flow constantly playing through my head the whole time. So I asked him for advice, and much to my surprise — though it also confirmed my suspicions — he told me I had to go back outside and make music, in light of this new state of mine, as an offering to bear witness to my new commitment."

Eliane Radigue's return to music and to the ARP is marked above all by Triptych, a work commissioned for a choreography by Douglas Dunn (on Ashley's suggestion), of which however only the first part would be used. Triptych is a composition noticeably different from the works that preceded her conversion to Buddhism. In place of the typical, ineffable "drone" flow, she opts for a circular movement of vibrating frequency, repeated in a loop within a mix that, with each return, brings out a different shade, playing above all with amplitude.

The result is a work of a meditative character, domestic-use environmental music, meant to be left discreetly flowing in the background until an inevitable shift of mood takes hold of the room and of the spaces of the mind. A work that, in its own way, ties into the contemporary developments of the thriving ambient scene inaugurated by Brian Eno, a tendency that Radigue had largely anticipated — both conceptually and stylistically — and of which she found herself an unassuming, unwitting forerunner, whose contribution has only recently been fully acknowledged.

The artist's creative path, however, only truly resumes in 1980, the year in which the composer decides to reopen the mystical "Adnos" chapter — a mysticism that, in light of her recent conversion and the six years that had passed since the first pièce, could only re-emerge in an entirely different key.

Adnos II, for which Radigue adds a further external filter, ranging from three to an octave, to the ARP's board, stands out above all for the different form it takes. For the first time, a Radigue composition is not a modular flow of microscopic variations on overtones, but something closer to an electronic symphony. Multiple impulses are involved, across three timbral layers, and on more than one occasion, by playing with different frequency cycles, they give rise to surprising rhythmic qualities close to arpeggios. The overall state of the piece is an extremely tense trance that once again shifts color quickly, soon leaving the listener with the impression of being lost somewhere within their own mind, amid bouncing neurons, psychic stimuli and recurring motifs, up to the long final stasis. It is, however, a restless stasis, a release closer to an "other" state of consciousness than to a general and equally provisional peace. A state that is itself destined to dissolve, magically shifting back into the same nervous tonality that opened the piece, somehow giving the impression of a vast, roaming, circular journey through the secret chambers of one's own mind.

The "Adnos" series would then be completed shortly after, with the third and final composition, also finished in 1980.

Adnos III can formally be considered a synthesis of the two previous compositions, built by merging the "drone" framework of the first with the rhythmic impulses of the second, this time emphasized through the use of a ring modulator. What really makes the difference, however, is above all the mood of the piece, halfway between the baroque (as Rhys Chatham once described it in an interview about his relationship with the French composer) and hints of what would come to be known as dark-ambient. Once again, though, the core of the work lies on its supra-structural level, in the way it calls upon the unconscious and introspection, in a guise never so romantic and unsettling.

It's no coincidence, after all, that Adnos III coincided with the growing attention being paid to Radigue's work from territories that had until shortly before been considered its polar opposites: ambient music above all, but also the nascent industrial scene, right through to the most experimental fringes of electronic music and dark-wave. Radigue's minimalism, however unconsciously, was in this way planting an important seed in the very distant soil of popular music.

Her interest, however, would soon turn elsewhere, reconnecting with the tribute she had long wished to pay to dharma and to certain symbols of Tibetan Buddhism. Much of the 1980s would be spent on precisely this quest, in a cycle of works of great importance and fascination that strengthened her bond with the Tibetan tradition, with which her work would from then on be irrevocably intertwined.

The first in chronological order is Songs Of Milarepa. Made between 1981 and 1983 with the support of a grant from the French government, Songs Of Milarepa is a work in five parts, five devotional "songs" dedicated to the life and deeds of the Tibetan mystic Jetsun Milarepa, ascetic, scholar of sorcery and poet-promoter of the path of dharma. Alongside her trusty ARP, in writing the compositions Eliane includes some sung passages captured from Lama Kunga Rinpoche, while inviting her friend Robert Ashley into her Paris studio to recite, on delayed channels, the classic English translation of the yogi's life.

The result sounds a bit like a group session in a deep meditative state. Eliane's drone once again vibrates in an eternal shifting of colour and nuance, unspooling in a seemingly more direct way than usual, with a raw, feather-light clarity, never so emotional. The two exceptional performers, meanwhile, balance its mood: Master Rinpoche's chanting voice seems to come from the depths of an ancestral and far-off universe, as if caught in the act of reuniting with his symbolic role as the last heir of an unbroken chain of enlightened beings, while Ashley's spoken-word, at the other end of the spectrum — and of the experience — instead has the bearing of an ecstatic trance, at several points seeming to find a communion of energies with the Master's rapture, overstepping what appears to be its inner function: that of a medium between the higher awareness embodied by the Lama, the cosmic forces magically set in motion by the ARP's "song", and the worldliness at this far end of the listening experience.

Two of these songs ("Mila's Song In The Rain" and "Song Of The Path Guides") were released by Lovely Music on LP shortly after they were composed, while "Elimination Of Desire" and "Symbols For Yogic Experience" would have to wait a full eighteen years for their CD reissue.

Nevertheless, the release is of fundamental importance as it marks the very first Eliane Radigue publication on a widely accessible format (her previous pièces, in fact, both by design and duration, had never gone beyond magnetic tape), as well as her debut before an audience that, for the first time, was no longer confined to insiders and devotees of the avant-garde.

The second great experiment of the Tibetan cycle would instead see the light between 1986 and 1987. Unlike the songs, Jetsun Mila takes shape as a poetic representation of the saint's biography, this time left entirely to the commentary of the ARP.

Spread across two suites of forty and forty-four minutes respectively, the work follows Milarepa's life through nine stages, from birth, his "wicked" deeds, the meeting with the guru, initiation, practice, the visit to his homeland, retreat, enlightenment and death/nirvana.

The first half of the work opens amid mist and haze (that of the Himalayas, perhaps?), a drone that grows stronger over the first twenty minutes before giving way to details woven in from the start within the low frequencies and left in darkness. What unfolds is an unusually dynamic, almost restless piece, simulating an experience entangled in samsara, in the uncertainty and anxiety of becoming. As we have by now learned, every state is nothing but the fleeting manifestation of a change forever lurking, and so the track lets us glimpse the forming of a strange sense of calm, in the beautiful, almost melancholic, loop that emerges at the composition's close.

A completely different air is felt instead in the second part of the work, which re-enters the ambient circuitry that closed the first section. Soon, however, the phrasing dissolves into an estranging, ethereal lament from the ARP, a prelude to an actual monks' chant that gradually enters like an acoustic hallucination, saturating the listening experience for much of the piece in a magnificent stasis that suspends time and space in a mystical face-to-face with the supreme of all realisations.

Jetsun Mila too would catch the attention of Lovely Music, which released the work on CD in 1987, with handsome packaging depicting Tibetan flags fluttering against a backdrop of a Himalayan peak.

The final chapter of the Milarepa cycle would ultimately be Mila's Journey Inspired By A Dream, a long and no less fascinating sixty-two-minute suite, featuring an excerpt from "Drinking at the Mountain Spring" sung by Lama Kunga Rinpoche with Robert Ashley's spoken counterpoint. The piece was released as a single-track album in 1987, but would only be reunited with the other songs — to which it conceptually belongs — eleven years later.

Radigue's creativity was once again at its peak, and the following year she embarked on the undertaking of creating a cycle of works inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. By an ironically ill-timed twist of fate, however, the two years 1988-89 were marked by two bereavements that would brand her experience and put her yogi practice to the test: her son Yves, barely in his twenties, crashed his car and died instantly, while a few months later her longtime guide and confidant, Master Pawo Rinpoche, passed away.

It is said that even Saraswati, goddess of wisdom and learning and music,

and then she is guided by them into it.

[Sri Karunamayee]

Tibetan Buddhism, syncretizing certain ancestral Indian beliefs, recognizes the existence of a bard, six intermediate states, the most important of which occurs between the death of an individual and their subsequent, eventual rebirth, understood as a migration of mental energies. In this stage, consciousness, freed from its old physical ballast, passes through a series of experiences that take it from the lucid realization of the true essence of things, to a journey suspended between sweet visions and dreadful, terrible apparitions that are the dreamlike legacy of the physical and mental actions carried out in the life just ended. The degree of spiritual practice and the way in which consciousness confronts these passages will determine the possibility of definitive liberation as well as the nature of a new earthly incarnation.

During this liminal period of suspension, whose length varies according to the individual's karma but is generally fixed at forty-nine days, the individual's energy remains open to influence by whatever is practiced "on this side" in their name, through a series of rituals, the best known of which is precisely the reading of those passages known as the Bardo Thödol, recited with the intention of "liberation through hearing".

Guided by the Bardo Thödol, the confrontation with death is here, more than ever, something far beyond a spiritual exercise or an intellectual digression.

The emotional intensity and deep engagement with which Kyema and Kailasha unfold are unmatched in the composer's output.

The first work in the Trilogie de la Mort cycle (actually framed as such only retroactively), Kyema is a sixty-one-minute experience that metaphorically concentrates the post-mortem journey of a stream of consciousness. The intro of this bard, roughly the first six minutes, feels the close influence of its most immediate karma: an oscillation rich in harmonics, close to the "psychic" flows of Adnos and Triptych, but with a tone that is nonetheless as neutral and severe as that of a passing-over can be. A tension that slowly dissolves starting from the second section into a sweet, drone-laden lament, an otherworldly sound that transcends familiar emotions and yet settles into the most hidden, deep-rooted grooves of consciousness. Every residue of attachment, of tanha, falls away, the mind finds itself in a state of complete awareness, cradled by the beauty of visions of positive merit. Exactly at the midpoint of the pièce, a thunderous passage at the edge of the lowest audible frequencies introduces a radical shift. The flow grows tense and menacing once again, eventually releasing a sequence of harrowing images one after another in a loop, in what seems, to all intents and purposes, like the crescendo of a horror-film overture, a presage of the manifestation of incredible malevolent forces.

Then, suddenly, everything grows calm. The visions dissolve and all that remains is a semi-muted bip acting as an interlude before the final stretch of the composition, which partly returns to the mysterious tension of the opening, this time resolving into an unprecedented, oscillating death-rattle heading toward a temporary departure, ending in a gust close to the white noise of a dense, primordial dawn.

The passage into the post-liminal state is thus brought to completion without any coherent resolution, nor any clear glimpse of what lies beyond the metaphysical journey. What remains, once again, is only the plain, indifferent evidence of becoming, captured in its most sophisticated manifestation.

No sooner had she finished Kyema, the work most literally tied to the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" – and probably its most intense interpretation ever realized in music – than Radigue began working on another piece, this time dedicated to a virtual pilgrimage to the sacred mountain of Kailash. And it is within this temporal-compositional space that the artist received the devastating news of her son's death, an event that would shape her approach to the composition, and because of which, as she would recall in one of her recent interviews with her characteristic brisk but serene manner, "I was unable to listen back to 'Kailasha' for at least twenty years after its completion".

Subsequently dedicated to her late son and once again composed exclusively on the ARP, Kailasha presents itself as a requiem with exquisitely fine ambient contours, without ever letting any drama or predictable emotional emphasis show through.

"In that kind of shell which is the dimension forged by the sound wave, the ear filters, selects and emphasizes certain acoustic objects, in the same way the eye might watch the glimmer of running water: at once absent and multiple, oriented toward an exterior whose image lives reflected in the inner universe". A famous passage, this one by Radigue in her attempt to define her own sound, which magnificently frames the state of Kailasha: a homogeneous drone expanse, apparently static but pulsing with refractions of varying depth, depending on the degree of involvement and concentration. Like a watery surface in perpetuum mobile, still and calm at first glance, yet immediately revealing itself to be rich with ripples, unexpected glimpses of the depths and the swiftest reflections. An image that, once again, cannot help but evoke the esoteric interpretation of the bard and the clear, fluid, unified realization of ultimate reality; of a transient state definitively transcended.

In 1992, while completing a third pièce, Koumé, this time dedicated to Master Pawo Rinpoche, Eliane was invited to the MANCA Festival in Nice, where she was to present the three compositions in sequence ("Kyema", "Kailasha" and "Koumé"), "A performance that, as a joke, I presented as a trilogy, given the common thread running through them. Michel Redolfi, who at the time was a frequent visitor to Cirm and would later become director of MANCA itself, liked the idea a great deal and immediately put it on the programme: très bien, and that's the whole genesis of the Trilogie De La Mort!".

Both in its sonic device and in its metaphorical implications, Koumé is the definitive summa of the triptych. As if, having once explored the course of the bard in its objective manifestation, filtered through humanly and karmically imperfect experience, the time had come to call upon an exemplary, higher intermediary state, backed by that total understanding for which only the most diligent tantric practice can serve as guarantee and prerequisite.

Yet another demonstration of Radigue's masterful command of filters, Koumé opens on very low frequencies in agitated oscillation. The soundscape is immediately taut and vibrant, soon renewing Radigue's typically spellbinding modus operandi: discreet flows in perpetual, extremely slow evolution, tonal and timbral changes that occur without any way of tracing their mechanisms, the sound progressively insinuating itself into the folds of the psyche until it becomes one with its dynamics and its illusions. The original theme thus grows stronger and richer in timbre until it almost borders on the monolithic. An imperceptible, hypnotic process of accumulation, which prodigiously transforms starting around the twentieth minute, first into an indistinct mantra of monks in yogic meditation, then, even more fascinatingly, into something resembling a Tibetan horn, and finally into a celestial symphony of ultimate realization and encounter with the Great Mother.

Impermanence, however, also acts on the highest cognitive levels: the vision naturally ebbs away, leaving room for an entropic void lasting eleven minutes.

If Radigue's music has nevertheless taught us anything, it's that silence is not a fact of this world, and that even when it presents itself as such, one need only sharpen one's own perceptual doors to unmask it, or simply to discover how much it can be something entirely different from mere, relative absence. This is all the more true when emptiness, silence and absence are raised to higher metaphysical meanings, such as the chronic lack of a fixed, unchanging self, as the condition at the very root of existence where form is absence and absence is form itself.

After the intense experience of Trilogie De La Mort, Eliane Radigue would remain silent for a full six years — years in which, however, her name never stopped circulating, with a few sporadic performances, while between 1997 and 1998 Songs Of Milarepa was released on CD by Lovely Music, and Trilogie De La Mort by Experimental Intermedia Foundation.

The composer's creativity has no intention of settling for an understandable and well-earned retirement; on the contrary, she further stretches out her composition time, letting ideas settle and come to rest in the best possible way, combining them with a precise and coherent inspiration, in pursuit of an even grander, more meticulous work.

Thus, at the dawn of the new millennium, comes L'Ile Re-sonante, a work with all the hallmarks of the definitive: a stylistic essay of unparalleled refinement and a carefully weighed artistic testament.

Eliane presents the piece, once again for ARP and tape, through an image that appeared to her during a meditation session: an island in the waters of a lake reflecting her face. At once a real image and an optical illusion. Once more, the reference to Buddhism and to the concept of sunyata, emptiness, and to the precepts of the Heart Sutra, is evident — but so is the nod to the poet Rabelais, from whom she borrows the work's title.

The piece opens on low frequencies with an unusual rhythmic delay, a severe, impassive drone surface, yet dense with imperceptible ripples. But at the ninth minute comes the variation you don't expect: the flow suddenly turns soft and light, gradually unveiling a motif of indescribable beauty, something halfway between an ecclesiastical choir and an operatic warble, transfigured and sent into reverb — an airy, dramatic movement that invokes the sublime, the perfect vision, positioning itself as the closest Radigue has ever come to that "classical" imaginary she had always fled from, and with which she finally comes to terms in a moving yet fully conscious reckoning.

But L'Ile Re-sonante can also be seen as a definitive test for the listener, at the finish line of an apprenticeship that has by now lasted several decades, in understanding the ultimate message of Radigue's ever-impermanent songbook. Thus, even the loftiest of visions, indifferent to the intellect's morbid attachment, inexorably dissolves until it is swallowed by the heaviest of voids. The final twenty-five minutes, in fact, are pure reverb of shadow music at variable, harmonic-rich frequencies, within which the same line from the intro can be glimpsed, stripped of all rhythmic character by further filtering. In a dark shadow-theatre effect, one can almost perceive the guttural sound of Tibetan chant.

A magnificent play of reflections, heights and depths, L'Ile Re-sonante was released in 2005 by Shiiin and received the Golden Nica Award at Ars Electronica in Linz, standing out not only as one of the finest works in her entire output, but also as a moving farewell gesture: after thirty years of "marriage", Eliane Radigue decided to abandon her ARP2500 and electronic composition altogether, having reached "as far as she could go".

Drawing on an idea that had been taking shape since the seventies, in 2011 Radigue launched the Occam series, inspired by the English medieval philosopher and theologian alongside the many forms taken by the element of water (oceans, streams, underground rivulets...). This ongoing body of works for soloists and ensembles marks a return to composition (without scores) for classical instruments — or rather, for instrumentalists as individual people and singular souls, with whom she establishes a relationship of perceptual dialogue and mutual welcome.

Just as with herself, Radigue does not ask the musicians she involves for particular talent, but for iron discipline, necessary to hear and recognize the microtonal particles derived from extended techniques, intonations and tunings that are sometimes imperfect or unorthodox, yet useful for probing the subtle filaments of an otherwise unreachable "endogenous" music; a virtuosity of patience, a care for sound sustained over time, giving rise to fully formed sonic bodies even within their apparent stillness.

With the same consistency that guided her years of electronic research, Radigue thus arrives at a precise cataloguing of her own musical thought, a pure, primordial aesthetic in which the soul of artificial sound dwells, finally brought fully back to the human dimension.

A year and a half later comes the second volume of the Occam Ocean series, a long suite for orchestra which, as its title suggests, evokes the largest body of water on the planet. The performance is entrusted to ONCEIM (Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales), which alongside the customary strings and brass includes an accordion, three guitars, five clarinets and six saxophones. As before, however, the approach and ultimate goal of Radigue's research leave no room for the most recognizable identity of the individual elements, aiming instead at the summation of single "absolute" tones, each ideally already complete in itself.

Originating as distinct, adjacent columns, the voices of the instruments gradually blur into layers that, from an initial — if wavering — stillness, move toward an apparent circular, gravitational motion: the ocean thus becomes the true mirror of the cosmos, the primordial source of the sonic phenomena toward which the French pioneer has always directed her ear and her spirit.

The Legacy

On the threshold of her eighties, Eliane Radigue is probably at the height of her popularity, still touring avant-garde festivals and contributing in various capacities to shared compositions — among the most recent, the excellent album Before The Libretto by the collective The Lappetites (alongside Kaffe Matthews, AGF and Ryoko Kuwajima), and the piece Naldjorlak, with cellist Charles Curtis, a work that represents Radigue's very first piece for acoustic instruments.

The influence of the Parisian composer is now more widespread and acknowledged than ever, yet remains nonetheless difficult to pin down. While her impact on ambient music, mentioned earlier, is at least evident (even though Radigue never explicitly formulated an idea of music as a soundtrack for non-places), her drones have caressed decidedly heterogeneous “listeners”: tributes of esteem and affection have come from electroacoustic composers, from figures in the industrial and gothic scenes, from shoegaze names and even from doom and death-metal bands.

An exponential growth in following and renown that certainly owes something to the broader “retromaniac” mood of the post-2000s, an attitude that has produced mass reissues and re-releases of much of her output, of which every label with any experimental ambitions seems to want to boast at least one title in its catalogue, as a badge of honour. And yet, never as much as today does Eliane Radigue's music risk being misunderstood and losing its deepest level of meaning, inevitably diluted by the rise of a musical culture built on portable playlists and constantly distracted listening.

More than a few have drawn a legitimate parallel between Radigue's opus and the work of La Monte Young. A parallel that nonetheless requires some caveats – for although she was well aware of the Hindustani tradition, Radigue never conceived of her music as “transcendent” or sacred, but rather as phenomenological realization, observation and meditation, as we have tried to paraphrase in various ways throughout the preceding paragraphs.

Nevertheless, just like Young's work, the composer's sound calls into question and vastly expands the very concept and definition of music, elevating it to an occasion for analytical introspection, a psychic and environmental reflection, a noise-based accomplice in the Cagean sense, relying solely on a precise and highly selective range of frequencies drawn out of a modular synthesizer and carried into the focus of a dialectical, necessary concentration.

“From the very beginning I always wanted to make this kind of music. This and nothing else,” the composer would repeatedly admit. A humble architect of the most discreet of late-twentieth-century revolutions, an ascetic with an acutely powerful vision, a teacher and companion on the path out of samsara.

Here, O Sariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness;

[Heart sutra]

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