The Brooklyn Rail

“No, thank you. No one is interested in my work”—so replied French electronic music pioneer Éliane Radigue to a request from Ian Nagoski in 1998 for an interview. It may have seemed that way to Radigue at the time, but today the situation is quite different. Regarded as one of the founding figures of electronic music, Radigue is known for her patient, evolving pieces that blur the boundaries between performance and composition. Still, Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue is the first English anthology dedicated solely to Radigue’s work, focusing mostly on her early tape pieces but also touching on her later collaborative compositions for live performers on un-amplified instruments. Somewhere between annotated bibliography and edited collection, Alien Roots includes archival documents like letters and sketches alongside contemporary reviews of her work and recent analyses by interdisciplinary scholars. The result is a book not unlike Radigue’s compositions themselves, an open-ended exploration that requires a bit of effort from the reader. Alien Roots offers points of departure for understanding Radigue’s work, rather than a clean-cut, definitive narrative.

In fact, editor Lawrence Kumpf outlines in the introduction that he sees the existing discussions around Radigue’s work as clichéd. Decrying the popular focus on the “subjective and pseudospiritual experiences” of listening to her music and the characterization of her as a “drone” artist, Kumpf began setting the record straight by producing a series of concerts in collaboration with Radigue and cellist Charles Curtis in 2019. While recordings helped bring her to more listeners, Kumpf notes, Radigue’s music risks losing its dynamism when experienced through sound reproduction alone—in fact, that may risk encouraging inattentive listening. Kumpf’s efforts to bring back the live element of her electronic pieces reflected the “fundamental unrepeatability of perceptual experience” that Radigue’s work emphasizes. In contrast to mood regulation via ambient sounds (including podcasts), Radigue’s compositions invite focused listening that engages with the subtle qualities of the noises of our daily lives.

Radigue, after all, was first inspired by the sounds of Pierre Schaeffer’s revolutionary Étude aux Chemins De Fer, which launched musique concrète in the mid-twentieth century. Living near a small airport in Nice, she drank in the aesthetic qualities of the Caravelle and other small couriers on their way to Paris and Corsica. “All it took was to lend an ear, to take advantage of the capacity of the ear to wander in an undefined world of sound, to hear, more or less,” she says in an interview with Bernard Girard, translated by Adrian Rew from the French and available in English for the first time in this anthology. After forging her tape music skills at the Studio d’Essai under the direction of Schaeffer, Radigue would chart her own path, favoring subtly evolving frequencies over impressionistic cut-up montages.

In these interviews, and also letters, Radigue’s sharp wit comes to the fore. One fascinating example is from Radigue writing to Christian Clozier and Françoise Barrière in 1972, when she lists some notes on her impressions of the American electronic music scene. We learn that she wasn’t too fond of the term “synthesizer” in French or in English, calling it a “barbarous word.” There’s also a prescient acknowledgement of the “at-home computerization” of electronic music, noting that musicians must “be equally at home using ‘Fortran’ [sic].” In another, Radigue makes a scathing critique of people we might today call “gear bros,” in response to an inquiry from Patrick de Haas on her sound manipulation techniques: “It’s always tempting to lose oneself in the fog of technical vocabulary that obscures the most elementary concepts, and to shroud in hermeticism tinged with intellectualism questions that are ultimately only of interest to the person responding.”

This quip would seem to contradict Daniel Silliman’s highly technical, yet fascinating analysis of her piece Kyema. Analyzing spectrograms and attempting to recreate the piece on Radigue’s ARP 2500 himself, Silliman argues that Radigue’s use of filtering techniques is “a remarkable simultaneous articulation of multiple modes of listening: the acoustic and the otoacoustic, represented by waveform beats and combination tones.” What he means is that Radigue’s manipulation of frequencies creates sounds both real (beats created by interference patterns) and hallucinated (tones heard but not physically present). Thus Radigue’s music takes as compositional material “a listener’s cognitive process of differentiating between figure (partial) and field (timbre).” It’s striking how this compositional model resonates with that proposed by Japanese kankyō ongaku (environmental music) pioneer Satoshi Ashikawa, who also sought to take the cyclical attention between sonic figure and ground as the basis for his compositions.

While Radigue doesn’t seem to have had much influence by way of Japan, Dagmar Schwerk’s contribution outlines the relationship between Radigue’s Tibetan Buddhist practice and her compositions. Schwerk outlines Kyema’s basis in the Root Stanzas of the Six Bardos—the liminal states between birth and death—while indexing certain sounds to the “throat-chanting of Tibetan monks” and “traces of chanting and ritual music as sounds resembling traditional Tibetan instruments.” Such a programmatic reading, however, risks mirroring the “fascination with ‘Eastern’ philosophies and worldviews in Western counterculture from the fifties and sixties onward,” from which Schwerk’s text attempts to separate Radigue’s oeuvre.

Madison Greenstone’s reading of Radigue’s feedback works—including Usral (1969), Omnht (1970), Propositions Sonores (1969–70), and Opus 17 (1970)—provides a bridge to Radigue’s more recent explorations of the physical resonance in Naldjorlak (2005). Locating the aesthetic value of these works in contingency—the unpredictable feedback between microphone and speaker, or the unwanted resonances of the cello’s wolf tone—Greenstone emphasizes the liveliness and dynamism of these pieces. Rounded out by a comprehensive primer by Curtis and a dense discussion between him, Greenstone, and composer Anthony Vine, Alien Roots is brimming with ideas and potential avenues of inquiry.