actuellecd

Éliane Radigue: Occam Delta XV

Bozzini Quartet / Éliane Radigue

In these two performances of Occam Delta XV that liminal stasis is beautifully realised… 5:4, UK

Bozzini’s deeply attentive performance reaches through the recording, touching this listener. The WholeNote, Canada

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.

CD (CQB 2331)

  • Label: Collection QB
  • CQB 2331
  • 2023
  • UCC 771028373123
  • Total duration: 74:15
  • Sympathique case
  • 126 mm × 126 mm × 5 mm
  • 35 g

On the web

Download (CQB 2331_NUM)

  • Label: Collection QB
  • CQB 2331_NUM
  • 2023
  • UCC 771028373185
  • Total duration: 74:15
Video
  • Trailer: Éliane Radigue: Occam Delta XV; Bozzini Quartet; video: Gilles Paté; January 2023
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In the press

Review

Simon Cummings, 5:4, May 12, 2023

You would think, by now, i’d be getting the hang of this piece. Éliane Radigue‘s Occam Delta XV, conceived for the Bozzini Quartet, has crossed my path on a couple of occasions, first at its UK première in Huddersfield in 2018, a performance that i subsequently explored in more depth, and again in January this year at the Dark Music Days in Iceland. i was struck by how different the two accounts of the work had seemed from each other, and that experience has been compounded by a new recording the Bozzini’s have released, featuring two further performances, made on successive days in November 2021.

The first observation to make is that the Huddersfield version, at around 20 minutes’ duration, is nearly half as long as the two recorded performances (37:25 and 36:31 respectively; i didn’t time the Iceland performance but i’m sure it was about the same length). i don’t know the reason for such an extensive change in duration, but considering some of its siblings in Radigue’s output, it may have something to do with optional aspects in terms of how long to remain in one episode before moving on to the next. All the same, an almost doubling in length is surprising.

i used the phrase “unstable stability” to describe the piece before, and as with so much of Radigue’s music, that seems to be an appropriate way to regard its inherent musical behaviour. But of course, the key thing with both of those words is that they constantly undermine each other. What this does not result in is ‘balance’ (i’ve just checked and am relieved to see i’ve never used that word when exploring Radigue’s music); on the contrary, while there’s the semblance of an equilbrium, Occam Delta XV occupies a gentle but permanent tension, like a piece of elastic constantly being gently stretched and released. i don’t hear that as ‘balance’, but as flux, friction, discreet energy, with the abiding sense throughout that, though where we are right now might be somewhere we stay for a while, the music is always looking ahead, ever caught in the midst of a gradual process from infinity to infinity.

From a listening perspective, an outcome of this is that it throws a lot of attention on the here and now, what’s happening in the music moment by moment. For music so glacially slow that might seem counterintuitive, yet it’s that sense of its infinitude that makes the question of a longer-term listening perspective (something i’ve spent years trying to cultivate) seem rather moot. It’s not that such a longer-term perspective is impossible, or meaningless, rather that what Radigue so often seems to be striving for in these works is that persistent state of semi-static movement, where lingering on what’s taking place right now is just as significant as what was happening five, 10 or 20 minutes ago.

In these two performances of Occam Delta XV that liminal stasis is beautifully realised, the Bozzinis keeping things in a tantalising state of sounding resolved, unresolved and in the process of resolving all at the same time. The work’s fluid harmonic state passes between contrasting states of simple and complex, purity and dirtiness; oblique notes suggest themselves as passing notes but don’t so much resolve as become grafted onto the chordal core. Even after this has happened, and that core has been delicately recoloured, it still doesn’t sound like a resolved action; again, everything points on, to the necessity for something more.

Especially nice is the way the Bozzinis control the texture as it ventures into more fragile territory. In the first track (‘2021-11-09’), at around the midpoint there’s a curious impression of rumble, and the harmony seems to be pulling in all directions such that the music sounds like it could just come apart at the seams. It ends up registrally polarised but somehow a perfect fifth fundamental rematerialises, whereupon the upper notes become dancing harmonics of the lower. In the second track (‘2021-11-10’), the fragility sounds more marked, which is appropriate considering how the opening minutes of this performance exhibit a greater sense of flux, as if made of concentric chords rotating at different rates, a mesmerising effect. The fundamental returns in the same way, and the closing minutes of both performances are, depending on your perspective, either an extended coda, gently tilting like soft fabric wafting in a breeze, or simply the current stage in an ongoing process without beginning or end.

In these two performances of Occam Delta XV that liminal stasis is beautifully realised…

Review

Andrew Timar, The WholeNote, no. 28:5, April 2, 2023
Bozzini’s deeply attentive performance reaches through the recording, touching this listener.

Eight women composers to watch in 2023

Lawrence Dunn, Bachtrack, March 8, 2023

Éliane Radigue’s working method is one of the most unusual among all composers today. Born in Paris in 1932, she spent her early career making music with tape loops feeding back on themselves, and later with the ARP 2500 synthesiser. But beginning in the late 1990s she began a series of extraordinary works for acoustic instrumentalists.

Much in the same way as she manipulated feedback on tape machines, this time live instrumentalists would be given a small, verbal instruction as impulse (typically a descriptive image), and asked to dwell on it. No notation is made by the composer, though players might make their own notes as memory aids. While attending to the play of high harmonics, musicians’ typically long and sustained pitches interact with utmost subtlety and delicacy (as can be heard in this recording by Quatuor Bozzini).

Radigue’s music is both intense and tranquil, enveloping us but also playing in the foreground. Her Occam series, all constructed in this way through verbal exchange with musicians, has grown to more than 60 works for different instrumental combinations.

Éliane Radigue’s working method is one of the most unusual among all composers today.

Review

Peter Margasak, The Wire, no. 469, March 1, 2023
Over the years Quatuor Bozzini have developed a sterling reputation for their ability to bring astonishing rigour and precision to the thorniest, most exploratory work — whether dazzling quartets of Wandelweiser mainstay Jürg Frey or the psychoacoustic experiments of Alvin Lucier, with many stops in between — and the multifaceted sound world they produce here is as glorious and rich as anything in the group’s vast repertoire.

Review

Keith Prosk, harmonic series, March 1, 2023

Isabelle Bozzini, Stéphanie Bozzini, Alissa Cheung, and Clemens Merkel perform two 37’ realizations of their delta from Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean across consecutive dates on Occam Delta XV.

If it were only the numbered series of releases from shiiin, that each Occam recording introduces something special could be considered a conscious aspect of presentation but as this characteristic continues through independent presentations too it might illuminate the naturalistic diversity inherent to a system whose foundation begins with the foundation of life. Recordings have seemed to so far systematically introduced occam, river, delta, and ocean forms, traced one performer through them, provoked comparison of behaviors in instrumentation with all strings or all winds. Always each showcases the relationship of the performer to their instrument and the limit of each. This delta feels special in that while other ensembles — Zinc & Copper, Decibel, Onceim — are anchored by a chevalier with an occam Quatuor Bozzini stands without as a kind of unit unto itself. This is also the first presentation to provide two recordings together, across consecutive nights and, though it’s ambiguous, I assume the same place.

And it is the first delta to sound deltaic to me. The quartet begins closer to unison than it ends, with the gradual recognition that bowing cadences seem to have drifted towards their instruments’ natural frequencies, twin violins in relative ecstatic excitation over low and slow cello, having got there by a meandering way that felt in the moment to be suspended, slow bowings’ strokes carving bank and bar in epochal time, a rise in volume splaying harmonics like the channel widens at the space it splits, the intuition and the information of never stepping in the same river twice. In between always a world of harmonics like life under a microscope, teeming. A few provide markers across evenings as fossils would. A kind of high-tension tanpura buzz. A dancing satyr fluting. The differences are subtle but tangible, felt more than known and ineffable. Perhaps the satyr’s bolder on the first night and the tanpura on the second. But it lights the imagination to wonder the minute physical parameters that would change the sound, the pressure and the temperature of the room one night or another, beyond the infinite variations in the performers’ hands.

A kind of high-tension tanpura buzz. A dancing satyr fluting.

Review

Ben Harper, Boring Like A Drill, February 6, 2023

Nearly twelve years ago I was in the audience for Rhodri Davies giving the first performance of Éliane Radigue’s Occam I for prepared harp, little suspecting the proliferation of acoustic pieces that would follow in the series. I’ve blown hot and cold on them ever since that equivocal premiere, having heard various Occam iterations for solo, duo and larger groups which I found either intriguing, technically interesting or just rote. Occam Delta XV, composed for the Quatuor Bozzini in 2018, is the first Radigue piece that’s got me really enthused since hearing her Naldjorlak trilogy at that same gig so many years ago. While Naldjorlak creates awe through its sublime, immaculate surface, Occam Delta XV is far more turbulent. The drones that make up Radigue’s compositions have always been in constant motion, but this string quartet draws on an inherent complexity in the material seldom heard since she abandoned the use of analog synthesiser. A lot of that can be attributed to Quatuor Bozzini, too. Radigue taught them the piece orally and their peculiar quality of playing — making music sound both very new and very old all at once — comes to the fore here. Two performances are presented here, recorded live on consecutive nights in late 2021. It’s a piece that depends on communication and mutual feedback between the four musicians to guide its progress, and so the two versions vary greatly, with each sounding more like a studio creation than a live gig. In the first, variations in the bowing produce a handwoven, folk-like aspect to the music, stretched and suspended into watery, wavering overtones like a Canterbury hippie’s pastoral reverie. Pitch material varies over the course of the piece, thickening into a dense passage of multiphonics while transforming further and further away from its tonal origins. From the second night, things are calmer but darker, thinning out into wisps of harmonics before ultimately resolving in more conventional fashion. I wonder if other quartets could produce astonishing results from this piece, but I suspect they would be very different from the Bozzini.

A lot of that can be attributed to Quatuor Bozzini, too. Radigue taught them the piece orally and their peculiar quality of playing — making music sound both very new and very old all at once — comes to the fore here.

Review

Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian, January 28, 2023

For her ongoing series Occam Delta, the French composer Éliane Radigue (b.1932) has collaborated with various performers, marking her shift, this century, from mainly electronic works to music for acoustic instruments. Occam Delta XV (Actuelle) is dedicated to Quatuor Bozzini, who premiered it in Montréal in 2018. Radigue’s music is about constant flux: sounds that appear unchanging yet shift almost imperceptibly. The business of listening is part meditation, part heightened concentration, or “hyperconsciousness”, as the liner note explains it. Out of long, sustained chords, a whirr of microtones and harmonics eventually become audible. The process offers a powerful antidote to our short-attention-span world, if you can take it. Switch your phone off and spot the difference between two different versions, performed live and played with dedication by the Bozzinis.

The process offers a powerful antidote to our short-attention-span world…