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Eliane Radigue Jouet Electronique / Elemental I

Label / Alga Marghen
Category / Drone, Experimental, Minimal, Musique Concrète, Contemporary, Field Recording
Code / plana-R alga029

“Between 1967 and 1968, I was the assistant of Pierre Henry in his studio, mainly for the editing of ‘L'Apocalypse de Jean’. He also put me in charge of organising his sound archive according to different criteria. It was an endless work... there were incredible sounds, a true sound library! He knew each single sound he had and was able to use them according to his needs. lt was enough to take the reel tapes out of their boxes and treat them according to what he wanted to do... This was my job: to archive the sound he recorded and organise the editing following his strict instructions so that they couId be included in his compositions. I really enjoyed it, even if it took a long time... So, sometimes, when I had enough, I took the chance to set the machines of the studio and do some work of my own... There were two Studer as well as two Tolana reel tape machines. ‘Jouet électronique’ and ‘Elemental I’ were born this way as a kind of recreation during my time as a studio assistant. Later, in my studio, he installed the two Tolana, a little mixing board (a vintage object made of an old block of wood with big knobs) and two loudspeakers. This, so that I couId work at home while he was in the studio during the very intense period when ‘L'Apocalypse de Jean’ had to be completed. After I stopped working for him he gave me this equipment and I immediately bought one more reel tape machine, a Telefunken, in order to work in a more correct way. I also bought a very professional Sennheiser microphone and in 1968 I could take advantage of having a home studio where I could start working for myself, something very rare at the time. Working with feedback is something that I learned through Pierre Henry. Do you remember ‘Voyage’? There's that fluid part which is made of larsens constructed with a microphone ... I developed my own language, my own definitions: ‘fIat larsen’, ‘garbage larsen’, ‘larsen vs. hiss’... there were several of them... I remember there was one I called ‘godlars’: I took several cups filled in different ways, which allowed me to play with the high pitch of a larsen passing from one to another. Everything had to be set at a precise distance from the loudspeakers because that is the specific problem with larsen, you have to be at the right distance... Afterwards, these high tone recordings were slowed down in order to discover the deeper character of their colour. This work with larsens was in the end quite limited and what I preferred, as a way to produce sounds, was working with two reel tape machines. The first was set on the recording mode while the other was playing and it was the accidents happening in this phase that made the feedback richer. Of course you had to carefully adjust both the playback and the recording settings, as the feedback could suddenly go out of control! With some fine-tuning you could reach very beautiful results: low pulsations, very high-pitched sounds, sometimes the two at the same time or long sounds. All of these sounds could be slowed down or accelerated, which gave me a beautiful material to work with... The Tolana reel players were amongst the very first machines to be commercially available at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. They were not perfect but il was really their lack of precision, which almost turned them into a real instrument. lt was possible... well, not really to control the sound, but at least you couId make it grow little by little, slightly caressing certain potentiometers ... It was very delicate and working this way was the starting point... With ‘Jouet électronique’ I had a lot of fun, hence the title... As far as ‘Elemental I’ is concerned, it was the first attempt at something which was very important to me based on the theme of the basic elements: water, fire, air and earth. I had the chance to record in open air thanks to a small Stella Vox that Arman gave me in the beginning of the 1960s. Normally you had to connect it to the power supply but I had asked a friend to build a box that could include batteries. At the time I was still living in Nice and every now and then I went for a walk to do some recordings: the sea, the wind, the rain, the fire... the reel tapes were only ten minutes long and I had to take several of them with me. I continued this way to built my very modest sound library, not more than ten reel tapes... This was the starting point and in 1968 I used these recordings for my work with two reel tape machines. (Éliane Radigue, Paris, 2004-2010, excerpts of conversations with Emmanuel Holterbach) Realised at Studio Apsome, Paris. Thanks to Lionel Marchetti for transferring the original tapes to digital. Éliane Radigue (1932-) Éliane Radigue was born in Paris. She studied Musique Concrète techniques at the “Studio d’Essai” of the RTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1956-57). She was married to the painter and sculptor Arman and devoted ten years to their three children. She then worked with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio APSOME (1967-68). She was in residence at the New York University School of Arts (1970-71), the University of Iowa and the California Institute of the Arts (1973) and Mills College (1998). She has created sound environments using looped tapes of various durations, gradually desynchronising. Her works have been featured in numerous galleries and museums since the late 60s and from 1970, she has been associated to the ARP 2500 Synthesizer and tape through many compositions from “Chry-ptus” (1971) up to “L’Île re-sonante” (2000). These include: “Biogenesis”, “Arthesis”, “Ψ 847”, “Adnos I, II and III” (70s), “Les Chants de Milarepa” and “Jetsun Mila” (80s) and the three pieces constituting the Trilogie de la Mort (1988-91-93). Since 2002, she has been composing mostly acoustic works for performers and instruments. Her music has been featured in major international festivals. Her extremely sober, almost ascetic concerts, are made of a continuous, ever-changing yet extremely slow stream of sound, whose transformation occurs within the sonic material itself.

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Eliane Radigue Jouet Electronique / Elemental I

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