Monolith Cocktail Blog

ALBUM REVIEW
Edoardo Maggiolo

In a synergy between our two great houses, each month the Monolith Cocktail shares a post (and vice versa) from our Italian pen pals at Kalporz. This month we relay Edoardo Maggiolo erudite piece on the latest project from the pioneering composer Éliane Radigue.

ÉLIANE RADIGUE ‘Occam XXV’
(Organ Reframed, 2022)

If you have ever stopped to look closely at any textile work, you will surely have noticed how, when seen up close, the filaments of the fabric draw textures and arabesques of subtle finesse. The same can be said of music: if we play a note and let it spread in the air, we realise how in reality this is a precious container of harmonics, true filaments of sound.

Few have explored this fundamental acoustic impression like Éliane Radigue, a French composer who has plunged into the study of sound over the course of several decades: first as a student at the Studio D’Essai in Paris, the former place of choice of the French Resistance and then immediately after the war it became both the national radio centre and the electroacoustic and concrete music laboratory of the pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry; then as a precursor to the study of tape feedback, and finally he was one of the leading voices of experimental electronics of the 70s thanks to her compositions for her modular ARP 2500 synthesiser, which she tenderly baptised with the name of Jules.

Today Éliane is a fresh ninety year old who lives in an apartment in Montparnasse and who for at least ten years has discovered the way to her fourth musical life, which began with the cycle of works dedicated only to acoustic instruments called Occam Ocean. Radigue writes with a particular instrument and a particular performer in mind; she invites the latter into her apartment, the two sniff each other a little and, if they like each other, she starts the job tête-à-tête. 

Occam XXV is a composition for organ and features the French organist Frédéric Blondy as performer. Here the instrument is completely stripped of any past sacred majesty, becoming the protagonist of what appears to be an icy stasis, but which in reality, despite its bare structure, is a slow but constant emergence from dark and humid mists until it becomes ineffable flight. . If listened to with a receptive ear and not just lazily reclining, on the one hand you notice how within the timbral staff that makes up the piece there are hidden minimal rhythmic impulses, fluttering harmonics and precious subharmonics that make up the wave movement of the individual notes and that they are the real underwater vegetation of this superficially placid sound lake; on the other hand, how a melodic progression of meticulous musical indolence is slowly drawn which, with wise calm, reaches passages of concretely pure beauty. Only in this way is it possible, albeit with difficulty, to describe how in these forty-five minutes one passes almost imperceptibly from the timbral-oceanic depths of the first part to the sonic ascensions of the finale; and in this journey into the unfathomable, the organ is transfigured, looking as much a bubbling synthesiser as a string section with very acute timbres. An ascent of vibrations markedly faded with the sound that, once it reaches the top, transcends itself becoming silence.

Like a thoughtful walk, in which only when we regain the sense of reality do we realise where we have arrived, Occam XXV is the sound of small steps on an acoustic path of mysterious fullness, which challenges even the totally inexpressive form in which is presented. One of the greatest works of a composer who has lived for a lifetime in the only fundamental element of music: pure sound.