Eliane Radigue

Eliane Radigue's Geelriandre / Arthesis is named for the pieces that fill its two sides. Geelriandre, realized on an ARP 2500 synthesizer in 1972, features Gérard Fremy on prepared piano. Arthesis, realized using the University of Iowa's Moog in 1973, comprises the full duration of side B. Eliane Radigue has received much deserved praise for her transcendent composiitions for tape, synthesizers, and acoustic instruments. Her work is deep, slowly changing, and timelessly resonant with slowly shifting timbres so dense that they seem infinite. Acute physicality, overtones, and psychoacoustic activity fills your space, follows you, grounds you, pulls you in or lets you go. It's all here/hear

Radigue's steady-state, pulse and drone oriented works for synthesizer had cast a wider and wider influence over younger improvisers over the years, especially those concerned with the layering of extended tones and the unanticipated patterns that emerge."Geelriandre," from 1972, created on the ARP synthesizer, begins with muffled bell tones nestled inside a drone that's just this side of harsh. Small sounds are added or removed over the piece's half-hour length, not through any strict system but rather intuitively, stressing the subtle placement of the notes within the drone-space, their sonic ripples the aural equivalent of pebbles tossed into a stream. At times, in its subtle complexity, the work comes very close to the sort of atmosphere generated by late AMM. It ends having, in one sense, traversed only scant territory; in another having opened huge vistas to explore. "Arthesis", performed the following year on a Moog synthesizer, largely dispenses with the personal flourishes and invests heavily in the essence of the drone itself, here a throbbing weave in which a given strand will occasionally rise to the surface and inevitably be subsumed, giving way to another. Choices are, of course, still being made by Radigue, but the overall effect is of experiencing some vast process of, for instance, leaning against the housing of an enormous generator, feeling its sounds and physical vibrations as one. It's ear-opening, invigorating music.