Eliane Radigue
from Maggot Brain Spring 2020
It’s near the end of November in 2019, mere weeks before news of a mysterious virus spreading across China will start to each the headlines. Within a few weeks, the modern world as we know it will grind to a halt, that frenetic pace slowed to a still. A new sense of time can be felt then. But there was no way to know any of that when I descended to a chilly gallery basement to experience magnetic tape playback of Eliane Radigue’s epic Trilogie De La Mort.
Upon news of her passing to the next world, I dug up this live review written for the second issue of Maggot Brain. Much like the what Radigue realized in this world, the memory of experiencing that sound seems to hearken not from seven years ago, but from another reality entirely.
A friend recently told me that his fandom for French electroacoustic composer Eliane Radigue knows few limits. He nearly named his daughter after her. He also confessed that his preferred method for listening to her hushed music was on a long airplane flight. And there was always that indelible moment when he would be roused from sleep of not knowing what was Radigue’s music and what was the din of the engines.
Fitting in a way, since the sound of a jet engine was the catalyst for one of the 20th century’s most ineffable sound artists. By the 1950s, the Parisian-born Radigue was married and raising three children in Nice. The housewife who had studied both piano and harp at conservatory now became enamored with the sound of airplanes taking off at the nearby airport. Radigue had a clear vantage to listen to the dynamic roar of the engines and the hanging harmonics they left behind as the planes streaked away. As she told Louise Gray in an essay on the origin of her singular sound work, “I remember [listening to] a flight between Nice and Corsica. It was like a symphony!” An orchestra in a blast of white noise.
