In certain circles, Éliane Radique needs no introduction. Among the first generation of composers to experiment with electroacoustic music, Radigue began her musical education in the mid-fifties alongside the legendary Pierre Schaeffer, becoming one of the few women involved in the emergence of musique concrète. After early experiments with tape and feedback in the late sixties, she found what would become her characteristic sound via the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she used exclusively for the next twenty-five years. In the early 2000’s, she finally turned to composing for acoustic instruments, bringing some of the most respected names in experimental music along for the ride.

The Canadian string quartet Quatuor Bozzini have also carved out a niche for themselves as an ensemble dedicated to a specific current of 20th and 21st century experimental music. Stemming largely from American minimalism and the work of John Cage, this tradition might also include names like Morton Feldman, Alvin Lucier, and James Tenney. Despite their obvious aesthetic differences, what these composers and Radigue have in common is more an approach than a single style, a philosophy rather than a system. In this tradition, simple processes yield complex results, time is a material, and the act of listening takes center stage.

Occam Delta XV is the latest work in the ever-expanding Occam Series, begun in 2011 and comprising over eighty unique pieces for a wide variety of instrumentations. Perhaps the defining feature of Radigue’s work throughout both her electronic and acoustic periods is an attention to microbeats, those rhythmic pulses that can emerge when interference patterns occur between similar frequencies. In Occam Delta XV, this is achieved via long, sustained tones that slowly change and recombine overtime. Yet the form of the piece remains something of a mystery: apparently, the performance instructions were conveyed to the ensemble by the composer herself without being written down, resulting in a piece that is never the same twice. For their part, Quatuor Bozzini describe the piece as something more like a state of mind than a score.

The album consists of two nearly equal halves, each comprising a performance of Occam Delta XV. The first rendition is akin to something like John Luther Adam’s Become Ocean or the opening movements of Radigue’s own Kyema (1988) from her epic Trilogie de la Mort. You feel the sun on your skin and the wind in your hair, the dawning of a new and solitary day. The second rendition is harmonically “darker” than the first, yet retains the contemplative air that characterizes Radigue’s work, with a seriousness that brings to mind her interest in Tibetan Buddhism. That the performers are able to coax such an orchestral texture from only four instruments is a testament to their skill and Radigue’s longtime-preoccupation with conjuring up these acoustic phenomena, yet it’s clear that the true work can only be experienced live, where the reverberations of the space create their own acoustic variations.

This is a slow listen: put it on in the background and you’ll completely miss the point. Take the time, listen to each track fully, and try to catch those shimmering tones as they go by. Something like a different mode of listening is possible here, if only you’ll let it emerge.

Les premières notes de Long Gradus (strings) sont si fragiles qu’elles peuvent se briser à tout moment. Chaque membre du quatuor à cordes Quatuor Bozzini s’incline sur un long ton sans vibrato ni autre ornementation, l’étirant jusqu’à ce qu’il devienne mince comme du papier. C’est comme le squelette d’un morceau de Sarah Davachi: juste les notes, aucune réverbération. Pour écrire Diplôme long, la compositrice basée à Los Angeles s’inspire de nombreuses idées qui ont façonné son travail au fil des années: des tempos lents, une intonation juste, des harmonies inspirées de la polyphonie médiévale et de la Renaissance. Mais là où ses albums précédents semblaient caverneux, Diplôme long dépouille sa musique jusqu’à ses os, en se concentrant sur le timbre de chaque note individuelle.

Davachi a composé Diplôme long alors qu’elle était en résidence au Composer’s Kitchen du Quatuor Bozzini. Les artistes ont travaillé en étroite collaboration pour développer cette pièce qui explore la psychoacoustique, la science du son et de la perception, à travers des sons soutenus. Il est composé de quatre mouvements, chacun d’une durée comprise entre 15 et 17 minutes, qui progressent à travers une série d’intervalles, suivant leur évolution dans le temps. Conçu comme un travail ouvert, Diplôme long propose des lignes directrices mais pas de règles strictes, il peut donc être joué par n’importe quel groupe de quatre instruments.

Dans la version album, Davachi montre l’adaptabilité de la composition en présentant des enregistrements de quatuor à cordes, de bois, de cuivres et d’orgue, de chœur et d’électronique, démontrant comment la pièce se traduit à travers les instrumentations. Davachi n’a jamais hésité à écrire de longs morceaux (ses albums durent souvent une heure ou plus), mais Diplôme long pousse son travail à un nouvel extrême. Ses quatre disques s’étalent sur quatre heures et demie, examinant les contours de l’œuvre sous toutes les coutures.

Partout, les tons entrent et s’estompent avec la facilité de la respiration. Chaque mouvement passe des tons graves aux aigus de manière presque imperceptible, à l’exception de quelques conflits occasionnels entre les fréquences, et de longues pauses entre les notes confèrent à la musique une qualité glaciale. Davachi a toujours exploré le mouvement mesuré et subtil: ses progressions prolongées semblent souvent exister en dehors du temps, se déplaçant à un rythme guidé par l’intuition. Mais c’est une image agrandie, et Diplôme long montre le granuleux: Avec cette composition, Davachi nous invite à faire le point sur chaque tonalité dans les moindres détails.

The first few notes of Long Gradus (strings) are so fragile that they might break at any moment. Each member of string quartet Quatuor Bozzini bows one long tone without any vibrato or other ornamentation, stretching it out until it becomes paper thin. It’s like a skeleton of a Sarah Davachi piece — just the notes, none of the reverb. To write Long Gradus, the Los Angeles-based composer draws on many of the ideas that have shaped her work over the years — slow tempos, just intonation, harmonies inspired by Medieval and Renaissance polyphony. But where her previous albums felt cavernous, Long Gradus strips her music down to its bones, zeroing in on the timbre of each individual note.

In the album version, Davachi shows the composition’s adaptability by presenting recordings of string quartet, woodwinds, brass and organ, and choir and electronics, demonstrating how the piece translates across instrumentations. Davachi has never shied away from writing long pieces — her albums often run an hour or more — but Long Gradus takes her work to a new extreme. Its four discs spread out over four and a half hours, examining the contours of the work from seemingly every angle.

Throughout, tones enter and fade with the ease of breathing. Each movement creeps from low to high pitches almost unnoticeably, save for some occasional clashes between frequencies, and ample pauses between notes give the music a glacial quality. Davachi has always explored measured, subtle motion: Her stretched-out progressions often seem to exist outside of time, moving at a pace that’s guided by intuition. But that’s a zoomed-out picture, and Long Gradus shows the granular: With this composition, Davachi invites us to take stock of every tone in the minutest detail.

The four iterations take on strikingly different qualities. When notes get close together in the string quartet version, there’s pronounced beating; when woodwinds play, there are soaring overtones. The strings often sound ghostly, while the woodwinds are bright and feathery; organ and brass feel deep and resonant while choir and electronics take on a Medieval air. Those changes are so subtle that listening to each feels repetitive—this is the same piece, after all, just played by a different set of tools. But the four versions of Long Gradus do show how the work transcends the particularities of a given adaptation. No matter the instrumentation, Davachi’s music is still evolving.

A stunning four disc epic, Long Gradus: Arrangements reveals the sheer depth of her process by presenting work in four separate arrangements: strings, woodwinds, brass & organ and choir & electronics. Glacially slow to encourage the deepest possible listening, it’s an immersive, psychoacoustic delight.

We’re always impressed by Davachi’s music, and somehow she keeps finding a way to one-up herself, taking a studied process and well-developed concepts to new places each time. A “gradus” is a kind of manual that was used in classical education to help students write in Greek or Latin verse; Davachi considers Long Gradus a way to help listeners familiarise themselves with her techniques, teaching active listening by immersing us in sound, not just theory.

Davachi started work on the album back in 2020 when she was invited to participate in Quatuor Bozzini’s ensemble’s Composer’s Kitchen residency; for obvious reasons, the session was delayed for a year, but this gave Davachi the time to to consider the piece more rigorously. So while it was written for string quartet, it developed into a four part exploration of horizontal shifts and chordal suspension that could be mapped to any four instruments capable of producing a seventh harmonic. “Substitution of the string quartet with other instruments as desired or imagined, both acoustic and electronic, is entirely acceptable and indeed encouraged,” the accompanying press release reads.

On the ’strings’ version, Davachi’s process is at its most pure, with each player’s sustained tones gently rubbing against each other, illustrating the gradual changes in pitch and texture. Her relatively open structure allows each musician a certain level of freedom, letting each performance shift as seamlessly as the tones themselves. Although this recorded version is fixed in time, its instinctively paced movements are so hypnotic that it can feel slightly different each time you listen. You should know just how much we love woodwind over here if you’ve noticed our appreciation of Mary Jane Leach and Laura Cannell, and Davachi’s version for flute, bass flute, clarinet and bass clarinet is almost predictably celestial, performed by Rebecca Lane and Samara Dunscombe in Berlin. The music takes on a completely different character when performed on such different instruments — with strings, it’s easier to bend, hold and manipulate the notes; using woodwind, the shifts seem more convulsive somehow, and the tones are all the more magical for it. Hearing both performers’ breaths is an additional texture that lends flavor and encourages a very different level of attention.

Davachi plays Berlin’s Emmaus Kirche’s pipe organ on the ’brass & organ’ version, alongside Rage Thormbones, aka Weston Olencki on tenor trombone and Mattie Barbier on alto. We’re not sure if it’s just because we’ve been so accustomed to hearing just intonation drone music performed on pipe organ, but the tonality here seems much more stark, with the organ picking out the wavering fluctuations and almost vibrating against the brass. But our favorite iteration has to be the final one, ’choir & electronics’, with Sarah Davachi playing sine wave oscillators and mezzo-soprano Judith Berkson handling the vocals. This version harks back to some of Davachi’s most affecting recordings (such as last year’s divine ’Two Sisters’), and marinates in its own restraint. Davachi’s gentle processing is particularly notable; the vocals sound almost like they’re being rendered from a dream or a hazy memory, brushed and sculpted so they drape over the pure sine tones like silk.

Clocking in at four and a half hours, Long Gradus: Arrangements isn’t for the faint-hearted, but anyone who’s fascinated by tone, pitch and patience will be rewarded for their time. Whether you’re interested in Éliane Radigue, La Monte Young, Kali Malone or Ellen Arkbro, this is a crucial, poetic handbook that grows with each moment.

With Long Gradus, Sarah Davachi seizes the opportunity to take one idea and explore it from as many angles as possible. The celebrated composer and ambient artist is consistently investigating musical possibilities from a learned, authoritative perspective and so this latest project finds her expanding on an initial invitation to the Composer’s Kitchen residency in the Netherlands. Fundamentally scored for a string quartet, Davachi’s intention with the stirring, sustained tension of Long Gradus was that it could be performed on a number of different instruments, and this expansive four-CD edition on her Late Music label presents the piece performed on woodwinds, brass and organ and choir and electronics alongside the fundamental string version.

Une poésie mélancolique traverse, avec des circonvolutions et à son rythme, les 13 morceaux de Ch’val, l’album du guitariste montréalais André Duchesne, patiemment construit en solitaire chez lui, entre marches matinales et évocations poignantes de sa sœur disparue — c’est elle qui «rêvait de chevaux». La guitare est à l’avant-plan, aux parties pas toujours écrites, mais Duchesne y ajoute basse, batterie — et, en de rares occasions, sa voix, plus récitante que chantante —, groupe virtuel à lui tout seul: le résultat est tendre, débutant par un échevelé Ch’fal ch’fal, suivi du mélodique À celle qui rêvait de chevaux, avant que l’inspiration ne se perde dans des pérégrinations plus jazzy (Rêves de chevaux).