Eliane Radigue

Featuring: Quatuor Bozzini

Much-needed repress. "I was very honoured to receive this request from Quatuor Bozzini, whose immense talent I already knew. The first meeting was very warm, friendly and familiar, like a reunion of old friends after a long separation." —Éliane Radigue 

Thus began the collaboration between Quatuor Bozzini and Éliane Radigue. In the hospitable atmosphere of her apartment, the composer conveyed the intricacies of her sound to QB. Her entire career, Radigue has been dedicated to building a body of work in which, from long sustained tones, microbeats between frequencies emerge. Radigue transmitted Occam Delta XV (2018) to QB — the dedicatee of the piece — through an oral composition process which, given Radigue’s experience with electronic instruments, was the most natural way of communicating.

"Playing Occam Delta XV, for QB, is like jumping in a lake when you know the water might be cold: “It’s a question of trusting the people you’re playing with.” At every performance, Radigue’s music is akin to water: always in movement, yet always somehow the same. As the present recordings of Occam Delta XV testify, each performance of the piece offers a different musical experience. “You can’t re-create the performance. It’s so much about the time and the place,” says Alissa Cheung, “but now that we’ve played it many times, we know that state of mind intimately and we come back to it.” It is this mental zone that QB refines over performances of Radigue’s work. In addition to the technical bravura that is required to maintain sustained notes, Occam Delta XV demands of QB an elevated listening mode, somewhere “between meditation and hyperconsciousness.”

The encounter between QB and Radigue points to the challenging nature of auditory availability in Radigue’s music. Yet, as one may experience while listening to this album, such acute awareness transfers to all listeners of Radigue’s music: Radigue’s sound holds the potential to shake expectations regarding performance, listening, and music making.“