You have to wholly surrender yourself to Elian Radigue's work; it is immersive music, pure and simple, that one must commit to with complete and total submission. Radigue was already minting some pioneering work before this collection of pieces was initiated from out of her Paris studio circa 1970, each created for various sound installations (they were, in fact, meant to be individual sound installations in their own right). Realized without the aid of synthesizers of any kind, predating her eventual use of the ARP 2500, yet sounding remarkably as if devised by one. The ability of Radigue to get so much mileage out of the barest of materials (magnetic tape loops, run in and out of phase, altered, spliced, and edited, and those loops' resultant feedback) remains quite an achievement in the history of electronic music, one which presaged everyone from Phill Niblock and the subsequent Reich/Glass axis to the hordes of young whippersnappers curling a tone or two in an effort to drone on as gracefully as Ms. Radigue herself.
Contained here on two discs, these works also came well before Brian Eno's own tape loop experiments and forging of "ambient" music as a formal genre and methodology, ultimately reaching similar conclusions. Letting these tones whirr, whorl and eddy throughout your listening space results in an almost full-on psychedelic experience. The opening "Onward 9.5" is mesmerizing enough, but it's "sequel", "Onward 19", tickles the ear and frontal lobes even more vividly. Again, on face, these horizontal hums do little but seemingly float and waver, but their persistent wow and flutter eventually achieve gargantuan proportions; played at low volume, the resulting ambience seems to make the very walls quiver, but turn those dials up and you might very well melt those same walls. What this reveals is a composer whose minimalist creations housed many degrees of molten power, an effect which operates on numerous psychic levels and tends to promote differing dream states, a position made all the more rewarding should the listener practice "deep listening", something most popular music never required, desired, or sought.
For Radigue, such deep listening is essential to understanding, appreciating, and ultimately basking wholecloth in her vibrant susurrations. The second disc is no less galvanizing than the first, the ear struggling to reconcile that the amalgam of colorful pulsations, swirling notes, and fluid lines are not coming from a bank of synthesizers but spools of tape and feedback. Like the other recent reissue on Important (Triptych), this is an essential work that demands attention and should promote both discussion and argument, not just for the scholarly type; Radigue's ingenious bending of electronic emissions should practically be required listening.
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