Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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Hekla's music exists singularly. A one-off talent, emerging from no particular scene, ascribing to no particular rules.
As a creative tool, the theremin - bizarre, unique, and rarely heard - can be expressive, intuitive and highly adaptable. In Hekla's hands, her instrument covers an enormous range, from skittering birdsong of high frequency chirrups and chirps, to grinding, tectonic sub-bass. We are given the throbbing, apocalyptic dread of "Muddle" and the baroque beauty of traditional Icelandic hymn "Heyr Himna Smi∂ur" in sequential tracks on the album's A-Side. Appropriately, she also writes that the album title - Á - is similarly multifaceted in her native Icelandic: "a river is an á and also it means ouch like when you hurt yourself, and also when you put something on top of something you put it á (on) something."
Disguised as the meandering outpourings of vacant thought and activity dialed simultaneously from zero and ten. Formed in the cauldron of a fevered mistake resolute. Surrounded by ignorance, dis-interest, and the attention of the carefully self-selected. Recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space. Forever exiled to the very bottom of the world to reflect on the struggling desperate pile above. Recognizing any contribution as minuscule and insignificant when placed within the greatness of the other, the dominant insolent preening satisfied, continually shouting the pre-eminence of the first world order.
Short Scenes came to life when working on a soundtrack with violinist Anne Bakker. Taking a series of her improvisations as the starting point, I started to edit and construct them into new songs - no preconceived plan, just being lead by these violin recordings. Still working in the "soundtrack modus operandi," the resulting tracks are short and concise. None of them ended up being used in a score, but from the very beginning I felt these little vignettes would form a darn fine album. And here it is.
Originally released by Wounded Wolf Press as a limited release (only 100 cassettes were made) back in 2016, Loopworks finds Turkish visual and sound artist Koray Kantarcioğlu (Ankara, 1982) exploring the unlimited possibilities of databending. As source material Koray used samples he dug from Turkish records that were released in the 1960s and 1970s, creating this unique sound using various effects, such as reverb, echo and tempo.
Loopworks impacts almost instantly mainly because it shows some familiarity with the recent work of Leyland Kirby as The Caretaker, particularly because of the "haunted ballroom" effect. Kirby connects more with the idea of memory and its disappearance/transformation, Koray Kantarcioğlu explores the usage and the dynamic of these sounds as ambient music for different scenarios and the importance of a new-found life of the raw material he used to create these songs. The source material appear as enigmatic as these new sounds and activate a sense of discovery and constant wonder throughout Loopworks.
With the vinyl release of Loopworks we continue to manifest the importance of showing how technology and geography create different and original approaches to the standard western interpretation of field recordings and sound manipulation. Koray Kantarcioğlu’s work here is a strong manifestation of that and how "haunted music" can express myriad feelings and sensations.
Loopworks has a tremendous vision of the metamorphosis that's been occurring in ambient music during the last decade. Sometimes it is dreamy and calm as aquarium music is ("500606" or "22 47 91 Take 1"); surprising and infinite as "263 Loop," one of the few tracks with a voice, in this case a mysterious and transcendental one; or part of a John Carpenter & David Lynch film yet to be made ("Organ Extract KP 001").
A fantastic voyage, from earth to space, through time or simply as the most beautiful and peaceful dive into the ocean. Old music transformed into something new, unique. That's special.
Originally issued by Ascetic House as a small limited-run cassette release in early 2018, PLYXY's debut EP Gloryland will now be available on vinyl and digital formats by Hallow Ground.
Haunted by the pressing question, "What if?," the five compositions on Gloryland aim to create, in the words of the artist, Ros Knopov, himself, "a hyper-visual audio landscape of a world somebody listening can fall into and drown in."
The term "nostalgia" originally referred to the longing for a place. The nostalgia that informs Gloryland is PLYXY's longing for his cultural-geographic roots while feeling adrift in an alien environment. Born in Dnepropetrovsk, then the rocket-making capital of the USSR, Knopov immigrated to New York City as a child in 1989. In Gloryland, he dives deep into his uneasy childhood memories and their warped reflections. PLYXY marks the unreliability of his recollections by making it heard - the anthemic qualities of the five pieces are coated in an opaque layer of dream-like textures. From the elegiac opener, "It Will Be Beautiful," to the blaring rhythmic noise of "March of Youth," the greyscale picture painted by Gloryland becomes more and more refined below the surface.
PLYXY's search for a past is, however, less a sentimental journey, and more a radical confrontation with the politics of memory and the materials that serve as mnemonic devices. Gloryland draws on field recordings from Knopov's adopted hometown New York and Soviet films as well as performances from his collection of analog and digital keyboards, with the results filtered and re-textured through the producer's modular synthesizer setup acting as the final editorial layer in the creative process. The result is lush and warm throughout, but also demure and distant. While Gloryland might thus easily be pigeonholed as a hauntological record, it is one only in the term's most radical sense. After all, any "What if?" might turn into a "Why not?"
Etelin is the newest project from Students of Decay label head Alex Cobb, marking quite a radical break from the ambient drone of his previous oeuvre. That transformation stems largely from Cobb's frustration with the current experimental music scene, which has calcified into various genres and trends in recent years, losing much of the playfulness and actual experimentation that made the milieu so initially compelling. Obviously, Cobb is not alone in that feeling, as there are several outliers currently making groundbreaking and unique work (Cam Deas and Rashad Becker spring immediately to mind), yet Hui Terra is very much an unusual album that pointedly and willfully turns its back on the zeitgeist. At its best, the album hits some sustained passages of dreamlike beauty, but the bulk of Hui Terra is a bit more modest in its ambitions, unfolding like a more fragmented and hallucinatory re-envisioning of classic GRM fare.
Aside from being the birth of a new solo project, Hui Terra is also the inaugural release of a sister label to Students of Decay (Soda Gong) that will focus on work with "a sense of playfulness and a sort of willful naivety."Though it pains me to be driven to such a glib segue, I have to note that this album was partially inspired by another birth as well: that of Cobb's son.Much like Koen Holtkamp's new album recorded under similar circumstances, sleep-deprivation and being awake at odd hours were a major factor in the shaping the Etelin aesthetic.To his credit, Cobb took that disruption of his established patterns and ran with it, selling off much of his usual gear and starting anew with a digital synth and a sampler.Similarly, he made a concerted effort to approach music with fresh ears, using his son as kind of a sounding board for new ideas after noting that he responded most strongly to the textures and dynamics on albums by Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, and Nuno Canavarro.While none of these pieces are conspicuously derivative of those artists, Cobb is definitely fond of "early electronic music" sounds, as the foundation of Hui Terra is generally smeared, woozy synth tones and textures that sound like a lysergic vibraphone.
I was completely unaware of this Italian sound artist's work until only recently, but he seems to be having quite a big year, as his duo with Roberto P. Siguera (Luton) released their bleakly lovely debut on Lost Tribe Sound and now there is this leftfield gem of a solo album. While I am sure comparing one underheard artist to another is quite a quixotic endeavor, there have to be some people out there who remember Talvihorros's Descent into Delta album and Novellino does something similar here: A Conscious Effort feels like a sustained and immersive plunge into the mysteries of the mind. In keeping with the ambition of its apparent conceptual inspirations, the music is a shape-shifting and kaleidoscopic fantasia that seamlessly blurs together roiling drones, viscerally snarling feedback, skipping loop experimentation, and even an occasional eruption of pummeling, slow-motion doom metal. Naturally, I prefer some threads more than others, but the entire album flows together beautifully and evocatively.
The opening "Conceptual Experience of the Body" slowly creeps into being like a mysterious fog, as murky drones, shuddering strings, and running water glacially and unexpectedly cohere into a warm cello theme courtesy of guest Alex Vatagin.It is an intriguing and deceptive entry point, blossoming into nakedly lovely chord swells that suggest the start of something epic and Romantic.Instead, the album immediately plunges down a buzzing and roiling rabbit hole of hallucinatory darkness with "False Self Cage" and only sinks deeper into that dark spell from there."Cage" is one of the more viscerally striking pieces on the album, as its strangled and squealing strings blossom into a heaving and seething sea of stuttering loops, hiss, and shimmering noise.Even at this early point in the album, however, it is quite clear that the boundaries delineating individual pieces are largely irrelevant, as A Conscious Effort unfolds like a single, unbroken nightmare that gradually becomes more dense and more real.Each new "song" seamlessly segues into the next and the overall effect is like sinking deeper and deeper into an immersive dreamscape that seethes with vague menace and vibrantly kinetic textures.While there are plenty of striking passages throughout the album, they feel like they either blossom forth from a roiling morass or unexpectedly snap into focus from churning entropy.
Part of the beauty of A Conscious Effort lies in how seamlessly Novellino and his bevy of collaborators are able to transform their aesthetic time and time again, like some kind of fluidly shifting and phantasmagoric hydra.It is often easy to spot Novellino's influences, but it is impossible not to be impressed with how masterfully he channels each of them and integrates them all into a coherent whole.In "Boundless Hope, Boundless Illusion," for example, the stuttering warm chords of early Tim Hecker transform into a lush, widescreen crescendo in the vein of Popul Vuh's Aguirre soundtrack.That piece is then followed by a grinding, swirling, and throbbing eruption of guitar noise that would make Kevin Shields smile ("The Anatomy of Envy").Later, Novellino's love of noisy guitars surfaces again in the insistently pulsing "Satan is Always Happy," which marries the roaring unison notes of Sonic Youth or Glenn Branca with obsessively stuttering loops à la classic Oval.The last highlight, "Perceptual Experience of the Body," is a full band effort that does not recall anyone in particular, yet dives wholeheartedly into doom territory as a squall of snarling feedback and grinding noise rolls over the top of clattering tribal toms and sludgy, blown-out bass tones.It is admittedly a bit disorienting to encounter such varied tour of underground subgenres on one album, yet somehow it all works and cumulatively snowballs into a very coherent and satisfying arc.
The album ends on an eerily lovely note, as a simple, blearily wobbling piano melody slowly becomes consumed by a passing cloud of distortion, then re-emerges for a tender and unadorned final coda.Notably, I was initially somewhat exasperated by how little I was able to find out about this album or Novellino in general, as the arc and shifting mood of A Conscious Effort feels like it must mirror something like The Inferno or some found diaries from a Victorian mental hospital: this album feels very much like an abstract interpretation of a novel or a Bosch retrospective.In hindsight, however, the matter-of-fact and modest statement "Attilio Novellino is a multi-instrumentalist with a very detailed view of soundscapes" is quite apt in conveying what he does, even if it undersells it quite a bit.The details and the craftsmanship are what elevate this album into something special.Novellino is considerably more than a talented chameleon: there is a larger and deeper vision at work here and Novellino executes it all masterfully, crafting a richly textured, thoroughly absorbing, and strikingly vivid sound world that becomes steadily more compelling as I am drawn further and further into it.Viewed a single piece of music, this album is a legitimate tour de force.If A Conscious Effort can be said to have any flaw, it is only that Novellino succeeds a bit too well in creating a dream state, as the shifting and elusive nature of the piece prevents it from leaving a deep mark on my consciousness after the last note fades.It is a hell of a beguiling spell while it lasts though.
Two decades ago the Annual Readers Poll began. The old version of the first annual readers poll can still be viewed online here, but we wanted to re-examine 1998 in the new system and get a broader picture of the music of that year. Perhaps these are truly the releases that have withstood 20 years of listening or the readership demographics have changed in 20 years. Either way, thanks to all who participated. Look for a 1997 recount nomination round coming soon and the 2018 Annual Readers Poll to follow.
Album of the Year
Coil, ""Time Machines"" (Eskaton)
Tortoise, ""TNT"" (Thrill Jockey)
Current 93, ""Soft Black Stars"" (Durtro)
Boards Of Canada, ""Music Has The Right To Children"" (Warp)
Autechre, ""LP5"" (Warp)
The Legendary Pink Dots, ""Nemesis Online"" (Soleilmoon)
Edward Ka-Spel, ""The Blue Room"" (Soleilmoon)
Meat Beat Manifesto, ""Actual Sounds + Voices"" (Play It Again Sam)
Pan•American, ""Pan•American"" (Kranky)
Windy & Carl, ""Depths"" (Kranky)
Dirty Three, ""Ocean Songs"" (Touch and Go)
Gastr Del Sol, ""Camoufleur"" (Drag City)
Mouse On Mars, ""Glam"" (Thrill Jockey)
Chris Watson, ""Outside The Circle Of Fire"" (Touch)
Jim O'Rourke, ""Bad Timing"" (Drag City)
Pole, ""1"" (Kiff SM)
Gas, ""Königsforst"" (Mille Plateaux)
Matmos, ""Quasi-Objects"" (Vague Terrain)
Irr. App. (Ext.), ""An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding In Conversation"" (Errata In Excelsis)
Bedhead, ""Transaction De Novo"" (Trance Syndicate)
Vainio Väisänen Vega, ""Endless"" (Blast First)
Al Jabr (Richard H. Kirk), ""One Million And Three"" (Alphaphone)
The Body Lovers, ""Number One of Three"" (Young God)
Belle and Sebastian, ""The Boy With The Arab Strap"" (Jeepster)
Trans Am, ""The Surveillance"" (Thrill Jockey)
Richard H. Kirk, ""Knowledge Through Science"" (Blast First)
Jessica Bailiff, ""Even In Silence"" (kranky)
Co–Ω, ""Enter Tinnitus"" (Rastermusic)
Cyclobe, ""Luminous Darkness"" (Phantom Code)
Lisa Germano, ""Slide"" (4AD)
Dead Voices On Air, ""Piss Frond"" (Invisible)
Stars of the Lid w/Craig McCafferty, ""Per Aspera Ad Astra"" (Kranky)
Sean McCann celebrates the 50th release of his endlessly evolving Recital Program imprint with a major new work of his own, combining his dual love of literature and music into a unique album/book pairing. Of the two halves of the work, the book takes more of a supporting role, providing personal insights about the birth of each piece as well as the accompanying texts that appear throughout the album in often unrecognizably abstract or altered form. The album itself is kind of a compilation of sorts, bringing together four thematically similar pieces that are a mixture of live and studio performances and new and previously released work. The two new longform pieces that elegantly blend together speech and orchestral composition are the true heart of the album, however, and they are what make Saccharine Scores a landmark release in McCann’s discography. Glibly put, this is the album that places McCann quite firmly into "Robert Ashley" territory rather than "Andrew Chalk" territory, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that his voice as a writer is every bit as distinctive as his talents as a composer.
Given McCann's longtime working method of crafting, processing, and layering loops, the opening "Portraits of Friars" is something of a long gestating creative breakthrough and the culmination of a life's work.The piece, performed at the Third Edition Festival in Sweden earlier this year, was composed for an ensemble of ten and begins with most of the musicians reading evocative texts at a pace of their choosing.The texts are alternately strangely beautiful or eerily grotesque in an impressionistic way, unfolding as an enigmatic flow of colors, textures, sounds, and images that elude graspable meaning ("flies brown to green split jets of blood"), yet follow a sort of a dream logic.Notably, this is where the book plays a crucial role in the overall work, as the overlapping voices in the piece blur together into a largely incomprehensible swirl and the underlying poetry of McCann's writing is completely obscured.One by one, however, each of the musicians stops speaking and begins playing their instrument, weaving an elegantly bittersweet and dreamlike spell as languorous strings and angelic voices swell around the remaining voices.As it unfolds further, McCann adds another layer of hissing and garbled texture with tapes.It is all quite beautiful and also quite interesting to deconstruct, as McCann has essentially taken his loop-based aesthetic and extended the individual components until they no longer feel like loops, then injected a healthy degree of unpredictability and chance into the mix.There was no way for him to know when any of the musicians would stop speaking and start playing, so the way that the individual motifs intertwine and rub against one another was determined spontaneously and organically.
The other swooningly gorgeous epic on Saccharine Scores is "Pistons," a piece that began to take shape when McCann spent a few weeks in London in 2017.Much like "Friars," "Pistons" is a floating heaven of female voices, gently cascading piano melodies, and fluttering strings, but is a bit more hallucinatory and densely layered.That makes sense, as it is a studio creation, so McCann had plenty of time to perfect it even if he did not have the talent pool he had in Sweden.The other twist is that it more deeply explores McCann’s interest in unusual juxtapositions, which manifests itself in "Pistons" as a blurring together of the romantic and the mundane (the whole piece is built from an indecipherably murmured and sibilant recording of McCann recounting his various London meals).It is similarly impossible to tell what Celia Eydeland is sensuously singing in the foreground, but it apparently features recontextualized snatches of Baudelaire. In lesser hands, such a collision would feel like Dada-esque bit of indulgence, but McCann's intuitive sense of balance is unerring: the recitation of various foods is mutated and processed into a surprisingly effective textural foundation.Moreoever, once I learned of its actual content, it provided kind of an endearing window into McCann's headspace as well as a strong sense of place and time. It is an achingly beautiful and absorbing piece, easily ranking among McCann's finest work.
The remaining two pieces are also quite good, but they take very divergent paths from "Friars" and "Pistons."The first is 2014's "Victorian Wind," which was apparently McCann's first completely scored composition.It previously surfaced on the A Castle Popping LP, but its inclusion makes sense here, as it is a structural precursor to "Friars": the musicians were all given 10 motifs to play and were encouraged to choose the tempo and the number of repetitions for each.Unsurprisingly, it is a characteristically lovely web of tenderly intertwining motifs, but the lack of any vocal or text-based element makes it a bit less distinctive than the other pieces on the album.The bizarre closing piece "Passing-Ships," on the other hand, has no such problem, as a computerized female voice intones a numbered series of non sequiturs ("the lady opposes garlic on top of the dried calculator") over a gently rippling piano motif.It is arguably the least strong piece on the album, as it does not noticeably evolve at all, but it is a memorably surreal note to end the album on.It lies somewhere between fragile, warm bliss and lysergic magnetic poetry, which is not an oft-explored niche at all.
I wish I could remember who said it, but I remember once reading that a lot of bands get steadily less interesting as they become increasingly skilled at resembling the influences that they were trying to sound like all along: the most unique work tends to happen when an artist is still fumbling around and exploring.There are admittedly countless counter-examples of folks who have eluded that fate, but McCann seemed to be on a worrisomely slippery slope as his work became increasingly composed and orchestral: it is always disheartening to watch an artist I love start to sand away the rough edges that give their work its distinct character, even if the quality itself is improving.Happily, Saccharine Scores is a delightful surprise that dissipates all of my concerns, as McCann's recent neo-classical bent has fully blossomed into a fresh new chapter of singular and innovative work.This is quite a wonderfully strong and playfully experimental album from start to finish, easily standing as one of the best releases to date in McCann's voluminous discography.Beyond that, however, this is unique release for modern composition as a whole, inventively blurring together poetry, melody, spontaneity, and chance into something that is both novel and unconventionally personal.
Barn Owl was always an intriguingly fluid and evolving project and that creative restlessness has certainly continuing on into the solo work of Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras. For this latest release, Porras takes his conceptual inspiration from Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, who once mentioned in a conversation with John Cage that art exists to "sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences." As such, the tone of Voice of the Air is largely a meditative and drone-based one, but Porras also had some new revelations about composition along the way, diving into John Chowning's frequency modulation (FM) synthesis ideas and exploring how to use them as a structural basis for his own work. The results of that experimentation are often quite wonderful, as Voice of the Air is an album filled with strong, simple themes that vibrantly squirm, shiver, and oscillate with shifting textures.
Few things make my eyes glaze over faster than hearing about which synthesizer someone used to record an album, yet the fact that Porras used a Yamaha DX7 for this album is a noteworthy one for a few reasons.For one, Yamaha licensed Chowning's FM synthesis techniques for that specific model, so the perfect tools were readily available and Porras just needed to figure out how to properly harness them.Secondly, it is a remarkably affordable and easy to acquire bit of gear, which very much runs counter to the current trend of fetishizing the rarest and most fabled modular synths.I definitely understand the appeal of having an unpredictable electronic collaborator and being able to easily tweak and manipulate all aspects of texture, but the trade-off is that the gear itself often plays a significant role in dictating the structure and direction of the work.The traditional route of first having some strong and coherent ideas, then finding the right instrument to realize them is often an underappreciated one these days.That approach likely has a lot to do with why Voice of the Air does not sound like a synth album, nor does it quite cover any of the same aesthetic territory that anyone else has staked out in the drone world.There are certainly recognizable synth sounds and textures, but they are organically pulsing, sizzling, and shuddering in a sea of heady, psychotropic drones, and the mood is a unique one.If androids do not dream exclusively of electric sheep, I suspect their dreams would resemble the corroded and crackling beauty of Porras's soundscapes.
I am not sure if the strongest moments necessarily come at the beginning of the album, but those are the ones I tend to remember, as the album's seven pieces feel like they drift, twist, and curl like a long tendril of smoke.As a result, the boundaries between them become irrelevant almost immediately and the parts are stand out are merely those that occur before I am fully drawn into the album’s languorous and gently billowing spell.In any case, the early "Colors Passing Through Us" is certainly representative of where Porras excels on this album, as the piece is centered on just a slowly flanging pulse that buzzes and throbs its way through a warmly beautiful, soft-focus landscape of woozy chords before being enveloped in a shuddering, rumbling squall of static.Even during the piece's most gnarled moments, however, Porras still manages to maintain a masterful lightness of touch, allowing dreamy glimpses of organ-like chords to faintly pierce through the snarling distortion.Elsewhere, "Peach Fire" repeats similar themes in more inventive and sublimely gorgeous fashion, as the elusive, heavenly chords creep a bit more into the foreground and the pulsing backbone at the center erratically changes the rhythm of its cycling to weave a disorientingly precarious sense of time and place.
Sadly, Voice of the Air is quite a brief album, barely squeaking past thirty minutes, but it is a quiet minor masterpiece of understated psychedelia all the same.In a way, Porras's chameleonic career is like some kind of supernatural space virus from a horror-tinged science fiction film (albeit in a good way), as he seems to move from subgenre to subgenre (host to host), leaving something noticeably transformed and enhanced in his wake.Obviously, a few of Barn Owl's guitar albums are hard to top as far as carving out a small but distinctive niche in an existing scene, but Voice of the Air definitely manages to sidestep a lot of tired drone tropes in remarkably nimble and thoughtful fashion.  For one, these pieces are anything but static, as every single layer seems to be constantly shifting and undulating like a living entity.Moreover, Porras does not overtly appropriate many Eastern musical touches, but instead internalizes a foundational philosophy and applies it to something all his own.I was also struck by the occasional appearances of more prominent and rhythmically pulsing synth motifs that add an unusual neon-lit cityscape element to these flickering dreamlike reveries.Porras is doing something much deeper and more creatively adventurous than trying to evoke ritualistic drone traditions from other cultures or merely adding his voice to the chorus of contemporary drone masters, as Voice of the Air feels like a very contemporary and sincere attempt to create an immersive and hallucinatory soundtrack rooted in the here and now.This is an excellent and inspired album.
"Sixteen hours of peerless, important works by Eliane Radigue relating to her work with the ARP 2500 synthesiser between 1971-2000. Prior to this period, Eliane worked exclusively with feedback on tape and oscillators, but her work from the '70s onward is defined by an uniquely meditative and transcendent grasp of microtonal minimalism which has latterly come to place her among the 20th century’s most esteemed and truly inimitable composers. Bearing in mind that Eliane realized this fathomless body of work in her Paris apartment away from professional recording studios, only makes it resonate more strongly with the idea that Eliane was a genuine outlier whose uniquely sober work divined an unquantifiable yet ultimately human nature in electronic music.
Eliane Radigue was born in Paris. She studied musique concrète techniques at the Studio d’Essai of the RTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1956-57). She was married to the painter and sculptor Arman and devoted ten years to their three children. She then worked with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio APSOME (1967-68). She was in residence at the New York University School of Arts (1970-71), the University of Iowa and the California Institute of the Arts (1973) and Mills College (1998). She has created sound environments using looped tapes of various durations, gradually desynchronising.
Her works have been featured in numerous galleries and museums since the late 60s and from 1970, she has been associated to the ARP 2500 Synthesizer and tape through many compositions from "Chry-ptus" (1970) up to "L’Île resonante" (2000). These include: "Biogenesis," "Arthesis," "Ψ 847," "Adnos I, II and III" ('70s), "Les Chants de Milarepa" and "Jetsun Mila" ('80s) and the three pieces constituting the Trilogie de la Mort (1988-91-93). Since 2002, she has been composing mostly acoustic works for performers and instruments. Her music has been featured in major international festivals. Her extremely sober, almost ascetic concerts, are made of a continuous, ever-changing yet extremely slow stream of sound, whose transformation occurs within the sonic material itself.
Radigue found her musical voice through the decisive encounter with musique concrète and its founding fathers. With Pierre Schaeffer, first, and then Pierre Henry, with whom she learned and perfected the art of tape recorders. She then developed a unique style by herself, freely continuing the exploration of electronic sounds, progressing with tenacity through her musical quest, without worrying about current trends or fashions, paying no attention to creeds or dogmas. An isolated course, out with fashions and institutions, such a singular and intense music, so remote from everything..."