Swim with Me: Éliane Radigue’s Apprenticeship in Sound

2018

Topics:

Text on the music of Eliane Radigue, for a publication to accompany the exhibition Geometry of Now, curated by Mark Fell, GES-2, Moscow. February 2017.

When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other—involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted
– Gilles Deleuze1

I needed to work with each musician one-by-one in order to check that they were producing the sounds properly. The first question I asked all of them was: please, make some waves. Just waves.
– Eliane Radigue2

Éliane Radigue describes her work as essentially unchanging. “I always made the same music,” she insists. “I dreamt of an unreal, impalpable music […] that always eluded me. Each attempt ended in seeing it come closer and closer.”3 This ongoing quest for a music yet to come involves a paradoxical combination of intimacy and alterity: absolutely singular to Radigue yet in no sense a personal choice, the dream seems to have come uninvited and unexpected to shape her lifework. And its realisation remains problematic and incomplete—always under construction, and always a matter of experimentation: “In the same way that I didn’t choose the colour of my hair, I didn’t choose the music I was drawn to. I always just knew when it was wrong, and I knew immediately. I cannot explain why!”4

In the course of this “long journey through uncertain lands,”5 Radigue’s path has obliquely crossed many others, including the highways of musique concrète, minimalism, and drone music, but her work has consistently resisted assimilation into any major movement or genre. Across more than half a century she has developed a series of intense working relationships with various collaborators both human and machine: from the gradual desynchronization of multiple tape loops to the plaintive wavering of controlled feedback, from the rich harmonics and partials made possible by the sensitive filters of the ARP 2500 to the extraordinarily subtle shifting overtones coaxed from cello, horn, or electric bass, in each phase of Radigue’s work she learns and unlearns, always in the service of realising the same vision, and always with an ear for new means and materials.

This lengthy career has also been punctutated by periods of apparent withdrawal (years dedicated to motherhood, and then to an immersion in Buddhism). Yet the secrets of those “lost” years also insinuated themselves into her work without appreciably changing its essence: the maternal transduction of Transamorem-Transmortem and Biogenesis, the invitation into the inner and outer landscapes of Tibet in Songs of Mila Repa….In short, everything seems to confirm Radigue’s argument that her musical journey has consisted in a peculiarly immobile movement.

Radigue tells us that the life-cycle of a work begins with a vision or an image: “I must always have this vision, the primary image that serves as a score.”6 The entire piece will develop from this mental hieroglyph, which must be painstakingly unfolded, materialized, in an expository process that can take years: selecting and experimenting with suitable sonic materials, determining the proper relation between them, assembling them (“the first year is collecting sounds, the second year is putting it together […] fade in, fade out, cross fade…”).7

The transmission of these image-ideas forms the esoteric core of Radigue’s practice, a secret she declares impenetrable to Western thought:

the projection of ideas that inhabit the spirit of the work and which determine the work’s structure; images projected either by words or intuitively/abstractly, transported as if by magic in a way that Eastern thought calls “heart to heart” (the location of the spirit in these cultures), which here in the West we have had the tendency to situate after having mentalized, stripped of affect, in the brain.8

Although each of the compositions may in fact be associated with a particular visual image or personal memory, these seem to be secondary expressions of a more abstract idea the work aims to “project.” A personal sensory encounter or memory may have provoked the guiding image, but precisely only in so far as it stirs up, with a vague yet powerful urgency, some more profound idea that requires the artist’s assistance in order to materialise.

In the twenty-first century Radigue opened up her studio, putting an end to her long “marriage” to the ARP in order to share her practice with a number of musicians. In collaborative pieces composed “for the instrumentalist, not the instrument,” she develops a guiding image together with the musician, and then invites them to materialise it. Musical code and convention are set aside, in favour of a subtle and patient exploration of the overtone structure of each instrument. During an intensive preparatory period during which musicians must “forget everything to learn again,” they become not merely performers, but something like “living scores” for a piece. A music that is impossible to write down, therefore, can in principle be passed on; Rhodri Davis compares his experience of collaboration with Radigue with participating in a tradition, a kind of synthetic folkway that flows directly from her own practice, and is entrusted to her collaborators in the form of an embodied knowledge.9

But as listeners we already know Radigue as a teacher who initiates us into an intimacy with the strange element she has made it her life’s work to explore. Radigue presents us with vast soundsigns, slowly evolving complexes of tension, consonance, and difference whose movement prepares the ground for an idea to be projected. Each time, listening is a problematic encounter, a challenge to recognition, a call for sensitization and the development of new habits of attention. Every time there must be a reactivation, a reconstruction of the idea, and so Radigue’s work always also involves a transmission of her aural practice to the listener. The “magical transport” is a lateral repetition that relies on the heterogeneity of the sign—a difference relayed from listener to listener.

*

There is no apprentice who is not “the Egyptologist” of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs.
– Gilles Deleuze10

I am not even speaking about what I have done with these sounds —that’s another story, the way in which I organized them. But above all I did listen to them with the greatest respect, trying to understand what they had to say. Here, you’re saying this; oh, there you’re saying that. Do you get along well together? Yes, that seems to work. So we can go on.
– Éliane Radigue11

Over the course of her life Radigue has discovered, expanded, and become profoundly familiar with the interstices where musical objectivation is momentarily suspended. Early in her musical training she was fascinated by short moments of intermodulation in which what is heard no longer conforms to any specific mode or tonality.12 In such pregnant moments, a density of potential appears in-between the lattices of conventional musical determination. Subsequently, during her time working with musique concrète pioneers Schaeffer and Henri, Radigue recalls being attracted to those sections of tape recordings where the attack of a sound had been excised, leaving a continuous resonance whose complexity only lengthy repeated listening would unfold. On flights between Nice and Paris, during the period when she was collecting the sounds that would be used in Elemental I, she remembers constructing a “symphony by simply listening,” “mak[ing] her own music” out of the sound of the airplane engines (“some of which were more musical than others”) by “strolling among” the frequencies;13 she has even likened the experience of her own music to the throb of the airplane engines when one awakens, disoriented, in the cabin on a transatlantic flight.14

To take such moments of suspense and develop them into a new form of music, Radigue took as her basic tools slowness and change: “by nature slowness is expansive, yet it allows us to hear up close.”15 Across the vastness of her compositions, persistent fundamentals fade into the background to become nothing more than “carrier waves” for the micro-details that Radigue’s assiduous adjustments cause to emerge and wane imperceptibly, to flicker, stabilise, interfere, and merge with one another.

Affording greater precision and latitude in her divagations, from the 1970s onward the ARP offered Radigue “access within the flesh of the sounds.”16 The strict condition for this new episode was that the synthesizer’s keyboard was left behind,17 so that the vicissitudes of experimentation would not lure her back into the musical known: “when I was disheartened, it would have been extremely tempting to allow myself to choose the easy way in using a keyboard. I decided to forget about it so as to only have this direct contact with potentiometers.”18

Direct contact, the mastery of a potentially unstable physical coupling, the “pleasure of a work made with the fingertips,” is the vital core of Radigue’s work. At the time of feedback pieces such as Usral and Vice-Versa, by inserting herself into potentially hysterical circuits Radigue cultivated a gestural discipline that is inseparable from a highly developed auditory acuity; a tactile sense for the tender points when things could go too far, prematurely conclude in chaos, or diffuse into indeterminacy, and a passion for those minute thresholds where new differentiations could be opened up within the sound: “I just respected the behaviour of moving very slowly, not going too near or too far to the loudspeaker because that would make it blow up. I loved testing the limits. Believe me, you only had a hairbreadth to play with.”19 Poised, listening for signs of life, physically interacting with the body of sound, this “challenge to keep [the sounds] under control while maintaining the correct distance”20 allowed Radigue to develop “not only […] the ability to listen, but gestural patience.”21

Evidently, this is a process of sensitization that Radigue’s work must also encourage in its audience, if there is to be an audience at all. Short of simply not noticing the music at all, passing over it entirely incognizant of its organization and its subtle details, every listener must adjust their auditory habits to the micro-variations of a sonic environment which at first may seem non-musical (either overwhelming or featureless). As Thibaut de Ruyter says, it is “as if one enters a dark room and, little by little, ones eyes become accustomed to seeing very delicate things that one would not see in full light.”22 In Radigue’s own words, we must attune ourselves to “a certain slight beating, there in the background, pulsations, breath”23 if we are to receive her image-idea, and it is in this way that she invites us to join her in her lifelong apprenticeship.

*

Rehearsing his argument that learning, as a type of repetition, is never a matter of representation and imitation, Gilles Deleuze returns to the example of swimming:

We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do”. Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me”, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce […] The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping these movements in practice as signs.24

Genuine learning implies a transformation in one’s perception of, adjustment to, and conduct in the world—to learn is to cultivate a sense of the relation between one’s body and sensory signs that herald an unfamiliar environment, and to inhabit the problematical field that conjoins them as a field of tactile disparities in search of a new equilibrium.

Swimming coach Terry Laughlin developed his “Total Immersion” technique from the principle that, rather than pushing against the water, as conventional swimming technique teaches us to do, one should move through it as efficiently as possible. Observing that “the fastest swimmers took the fewest strokes,” Laughlin concluded that “shaping and positioning the body sleekly, rather than trying to pull powerfully, is the easiest way for humans to become more fishlike”—“reshaping the vessel” rather than “building the engine.”

Confirming the pertinence of Deleuze’s example, what Laughlin emphasizes in his yoga-like practice is that, although a teacher may spell out the precepts, what is crucial is that the learner makes a “conscious decision” to invest in “foreign sensations, alien commands traveling along your nervous system, movements that feel funny at first.” This is a “training that targets the nervous system” and involves “feelings, habits, movements that feel awkward at first and must be made to feel natural.”

For this aquatic asana, , representation and mimicry are of no help (“looks are hard to mimic”). TI’s “sensory skill practice” aims instead to “heighten the kinesthetic, or sensory, experience of how ‘right swimming’ feels,” “‘feeling feedback’, letting your nerve endings be your coach.”25 The apprentice becomes sensitized to the minutest of disparities: how much water is flowing above or below one’s fingertips, the slightest deviation from a position of balance, the drag of the water over the “hull” as it parts the water. Demanding constant attentive psychomotor calibration, physical discipline, and adaptation, the technique promises the reward of effortless movement (what Laughlin calls the feeling of “swimming downhill”).

Adapting to Radigue’s music presents its listeners with similar challenges of concentration, recalibration, and attentional adjustment—and can procure us comparable meditative rewards. It allows us to become a creature of greater finesse and grace of movement within the sonic element, but only by presenting us with perturbing signs that pose a problem, compelling us to adapt responsively:

Learning takes place not in the relation between a representation and an action (reproduction of the Same) but in the relation between a sign and a response (encounter with the Other).26

It is tempting to note here that water plays a predominant part not only in many of Radigue’s works, but also in her description of the audience’s role in completing a composition. Alluding to the attentional strategies of the listener, she suggests that “it’s like looking at the surface of a river [or] a swimming pool: you can see the reflection of the ripples on the bottom or have a vision of the whole and let yourself be carried away by what I call “dream gazing’, or fix on a detail and make your own soundscape.”27 She speaks of the “course of the sounds” in Adnos as a “conch shell” from which “the ear filters, selects, privileges, as does a gaze cast over the glimmering of the water.”28 The emblem of L’île re-sonante suggests a similar visual correspondence: “an island in the waters of a lake that reflect her face […] both a ‘real’ image and an optical illusion.”29 And the title Occam Ocean also perfectly reflects the circumscribed plenitude, the expansive reduction, the vast depth and beguiling surface of Radigue’s music.

Yet it is not really a question of the oceanic (feminine) imaginary here, but of immersion in an medium which, although it inevitably suggests this kind of associative image, is fundamentally of another kind. The truly cosmic, abstract element to which Radigue’s idea-images (island, sea, womb, plateau, storm) act as heuristic gateways is the non-organic life of the wave continuum itself.

Of course, not every listener becomes as deeply absorbed as the instrumentalists with whom Radigue works intensively. Yet in so far as we listen and learn, we all become apprentices and carriers of the tradition, developing for ourselves some of the stealth and nuance with which Radigue navigates the sonorous element, aspiring to the grace of her continuous exploratory adjustments, and bringing them to bear not only when listening to music, but in our everyday perception.

If “to learn […] is to immerse oneself within an alien element and thereby open oneself to an encounter with signs,”30 Radigue is an exemplary learner and a precious teacher. Her apprenticeship in the art of sound is an invitation for listener-collaborators to join a young tradition that enlivens the senses, couples us to novel disturbances, and propagates waves of becoming through and beyond us.

  1. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone, 1994, 23.
  2. Quoted in Kate Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean”, third edition-festival for other music, <http://www.edition-festival.com/?p=252>.
  3. Éliane Radigue, “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal”, Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009), 47–49.
  4. Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.”
  5. Radigue, “Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” 49.
  6. Julien Bécourt, “Éliane Radigue: The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” <https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/specials/2015-Éliane-radigue-feature/>.
  7. Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.”
  8. Radigue “Pour répondre à le demande de Julien.”
  9. “Éliane Radigue, Virtuoso Listening,” dir. Anais Prosaic, 2012.
  10. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (London: Athlone, 2000), 4.
  11. Ben Ratliff, “Éliane Radigue, Mining Wisdom from 11th-Century Buddhism”, New York Times, August 20, 2015, < https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/arts/music/Éliane-radigue-mining-wisdom-from-11th-century-buddhism.html>.
  12. Chuck Johnson, “Empty Music: Éliane Radigue’s L’île re-sonante”, < http://www.chuckjohnson.net/wp-content/uploads/Empty_Music.pdf>.
  13. Julien Bécourt, “Éliane Radigue”.
  14. “Éliane Radigue, Virtuoso Listening.”
  15. Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean”.
  16. Richard Glover, “Minimalism, Technology, and Electronic Music”, in Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, Pwyll Ap Siôn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 161–180: 171.
  17. Ibid.
  18. Cited in Chuck Johnson, “Empty Music.”
  19. Quoted in Kate Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.”
  20. Radigue, “Mysterious power of the infinitesimal”.
  21. Bécourt, “Éliane Radigue”
  22. Quoted in Virginie Jux, “Une oeuvre singulièrement musicale”, Revue TenTen, <http://revuetenten.com/une-oeuvre-singulierement-musicale/>.
  23. Radigue, “Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal”. This rare discursive text tells of the evolution of the ear as an organ that selects a “miniscule zone” from the “immense vibrating symphony of the universe.” Following this initial curtailment, the cultural processes through which sound is codified and becomes an object of conventional and symbolic communication leave abandoned a whole unlistened-for realm where the “breath, pulsations, and beating remain.” It is on this untapped reservoir that Radigue stakes her hopes of realising her dream music—and then waits: “The years where the techniques were not available, I still carried the idea of this one music in my head.”
  24. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 23.
  25. Terry Laughlin, Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier (New York: Fireside, 2004).
  26. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 23.
  27. Tom Johnson, The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972–1982 (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1989), <http://www.editions75.com/Books/TheVoiceOfNewMusic.PDF>.
  28. Michel Chion and Guy Reibel, Les musiques electroacoustiques (Paris and Aix-en-Provence: INA-GRM/Edisud, 1976), 135.
  29. Daniel Caux, Liner notes for Éliane Radigue, L’Île re-sonante, Shiin, eer1 (2017).
  30. Ronald Bogue, “Search, Swim and See: Deleuze’s Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy of Images,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 36:3 (2004), 327–342: 337.