2025 Stock, sold out at source. Double CD, released in oversized gatefold card sleeve, with 28 pp. booklet. First ever release of this really important masterpiece. In the annals of electronic music, certain works achieve an almost mythical status before they reach the public ear. Such is the case with Éliane Radigue's Ψ 847 (pronounced "Psi 847"), the French composer's 1972 breakthrough that has remained largely unheard for four decades until its recent release as a deluxe double CD from ORAL Records. This is not merely another archival excavation. The release of Ψ 847 represents something far more significant: the emergence of a work that Radigue herself has described as the moment when her musical conception was "closely matched in execution" for the first time. Working with her beloved ARP 2500 synthesizer - a relationship that would span three decades - Radigue created something unprecedented in the electronic music landscape: eighty minutes of sustained, gentle sound that breathes with the patience of geological time. What distinguishes Radigue from her contemporaries in the early electronic music scene is her profound understanding that technology should serve contemplation, not spectacle. While others pursued the pyrotechnics possible with the new synthesizers, Radigue discovered what she calls "access within the flesh of the sounds"—a phrase that captures something essential about her aesthetic philosophy.

The work unfolds according to Radigue's own programmatic structure: "Primary material," "First elaboration," "Conflict," and "Resolution." But these movements operate on a temporal scale that challenges conventional musical narrative. As critic Thibaut de Ruyter observed during a 2012 Berlin performance, this is "truly an experience of slowness"—one that requires listeners to abandon conventional time-consciousness and enter what might be called deep listening.

This double CD presents Ψ 847 in two complementary versions, each revealing different aspects of Radigue's compositional genius. The first disc captures Lionel Marchetti's 2012 spatial interpretation at Berlin's Club Transmediale, where the composer herself sat anonymously in the audience while Marchetti operated from the back of the hall. The second presents the original 1972 studio version, painstakingly restored from the original magnetic tapes. The comparison illuminates something crucial about Radigue's work: its capacity to maintain essential identity across different realizations. The work's belated emergence has been met with the kind of reverence typically reserved for discovered manuscripts by major composers. Critics have recognized Ψ 847 as a foundational work in electronic minimalism, one that established principles that would guide not only Radigue's subsequent masterpieces—including the Songs of Milarepa and the monumental Trilogie de la Mort—but would influence an entire generation of drone and ambient artists. As Musicworks noted in its review, the work possesses "a meditative vocabulary of secret gestures" that proves "utterly intriguing and highly captivating."

Radigue has spoken of beginning each composition with "a kind of metaphor." For Ψ 847, she envisioned "a geometrical figure, the cone"—a shape made of multicolored thread that unravels to the point of disappearance before reversing the process. This image perfectly captures the work's fundamental gesture: the patient exploration of sonic transformation occurring "within the sound itself." In our age of digital overwhelm, Radigue's patient exploration of electronic consciousness feels both radical and necessary. Ψ 847 reminds us that the most important discoveries in electronic music have often come not from pushing technology to its limits, but from discovering new depths within its apparent simplicity.