I first encountered the very special music of Éliane Radigue (1932) more or less in reverse. Around 2011, I heard Charles Curtis’ recording of Naldjorlak, and a live performance of harpist Rhodri Davies performing Occam I. These are instrumental works from a composer famous for her electronic output. Over the subsequent decade I heard several more live performances of pieces from the Occam ocean series, and heard stories from musicians who had visited Radigue in Paris to learn them. I heard a few works for the ARP synthesiser from the 80s, and L’Île re-sonante from 2000.

But it has only been in the last year or so that I've been able to listen to her feedback-based tape pieces from the late 60s now that these recordings have been digitised and made more widely available. In 2019, Julia Eckhardt's volume on Radigue, Intermediary Spaces, was published, comprising a long interview, Radigue's 2008 essay ‘The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal’ and a list of works and discography. In reading it, a complete picture of Radigue finally swims into view. Thus, despite knowing it for over a decade, it's only been in the last year that I've been able to fully grasp the nature of her music, its singularity and consistency, and the magnitude of her achievement.

For me, it has been understanding her approach to feedback, and the nature of her early work, that has been revelatory. It holds the key to the way she thinks about musical construction, the way she listens and (arguably) the way she works with instrumentalists. In particular, it's crucial to understand the distinction between larsen, and ‘feedback’, used as an English loanword in French.

Larsen is used to describe the more conventional feedback between microphone and speaker cabinet. But when Radigue refers to ‘feedback’, she generally means not larsen but ‘einjection’ feedback – the process by which a tape loop, containing some initial base sound, is fed between two tape machines. ‘This continuous process results in a very dangerous effect for the tape recorders if they aren't scrupulously controlled with the mixing console,’ she says (p. 88).

Radigue's first tape compositions – Jouet Électronique (1967), Elemental I, Accroméga (1968), Usral, Stress Osaka, Omnht, Vice-Versa etc., Opus 17 (1969) – were all constructed from loops of tape treated in this way, mixed together in intricately planned formal schemes.Footnote ¹ In these early compositions she established the working parameters that determined the rest of her compositional life. A piece would begin in her mind with an idea or an image. The piece's form would be worked out. Its materials would be generated – using ‘offline’ methods. (Radigue does not regard herself an improviser.)

Radigue's compositional method requires careful manipulation of materials that could, if left unchecked, run away into chaos. As Radigue writes in the essay that opens the volume: ‘So much richness in all this “feedback” and other chance or provoked “interference”. Such a challenge to keep them under control while maintaining the correct distance, the tiny adjustment that makes them develop until a terrible “fit” [colère] causes them to self-destruct’ (p. 12). (Radigue is hearing-impaired in one ear, meaning that her listening experience has re-oriented to compensate – possibly leading to her increased and intense attention to tiny changes in high partials.)

Such an attitude towards material also affected Radigue's practice in performance. Speaker cabinets would often be positioned pointing towards walls – allowing sound to reach the audience's ears indirectly, through reflection. Radigue would often remain apart from the performance space, in an adjacent room, or even a cupboard. Pieces would be performed sometimes once only. In all cases, the result is to distance the sound from its hearer, to both immerse the audience in sound and shroud it from direct view, as if the audience were experiencing the sound already fed back through itself.

One can contrast this attitude to her own work with that of her early mentors and colleagues Pierre Shaeffer and Pierre Henry. Both Pierres (as Radigue calls them) considered their works important opuses, to be considered part of a newly developing canon of musique concrète, which should be broadcast, heard and discussed widely. Their materials were presented to the audience in a construction which was witnessed directly. The intention was not immersion but communication.

The book includes a telling anecdote which illuminates the differences between Radigue and her circle of male colleagues and friends in Nice, including Claude Pascal and Yves Klein (p. 63):

It became Klein's Symphonie Monoton-Silence.

It was not Radigue's style to propose and execute a work with such basic materials and dimensions. But for Klein, here was an opportunity to stamp his presence on the world – to make a statement of sufficient directness and audaciousness as to attract the attention he desired. Radigue's work rewards attention but it does not demand it. It does not come to you; you have to come to it.

It is ultimately this phenomenon – that of her collaborators ‘coming to’ her work – that has enabled the remarkable series of instrumental works over the last two decades. She has not gone out to unfamiliar musicians with instructions and scores. Rather, musicians who know her way of working with electronics have made the pilgrimage to her Paris atelier. In such circumstances, her imaginatively generous yet retiring way of working makes sense. Why make scores for publication to be read by just anybody, when one is making works for specific individuals? Why not transmit the composition orally, with private explanatory notes and drawings as required? (Since 2011, the Occam ocean series has grown to encompass 69 works, for individual soloists, duos, trios and groups of up to seven players or more.)

In a sense, the Occam ocean series comprises a mirror image of her feedback works: Radigue is engaged in secluded, offline activity, working closely with the material of musical production – in this case acoustic instrumentalists. She provides a certain amount of initial material, as one would with a tape loop fed between two machines, and the instrumentalist's playing analogously feeds back on to itself, as the experience of performing using (typically) only a single mental image is continuously deepened.

It can sometimes seem like Radigue's compositional activity underwent a fundamental break as she departed from electronic composition – after all, her change of compositional priorities coincided with the advent of digital technology. (Despite putting in much effort in the 90s to figure out how best to use digital technology, she remains an ‘analogue’ composer.) Yet what Intermediary Spaces provides is proof of just how unbroken Radigue's compositional mindset has been. She has applied similar types of musical thinking across multiple arenas, from feedback-derived fixed tape works, to open-duration tape installations, to tape works using the ARP synthesiser, to works for acoustic instrumentalists. A single ocean of vibration, being cultivated and guided at a distance, allowing it to feed back on to itself, generating an infinite play of resonance.

‘The freedom to be immersed in the ambivalence of continuous modulation… The freedom to let yourself be overwhelmed, submerged in a continuous sound flow, where perceptual acuity is heightened through the discovery of a slight beating, there in the background, pulsations, breath. The freedom of a development beyond temporality in which the instant is limitless’ (p. 16). For anyone interested in Radigue's work, the history of electronic music and the situation of instrumental music in the present day, this book is essential.