Eliane Radigue - Triptych

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5...according to our Ant on Fri 06 Nov, 2009.

Among my most anticipated releases of the year are the two new Eliane Radigue CD's on Important. Right now I'm listening to 'Triptych', a previously unreleased work from 1978. How this has remained unreleased for 30 years is a mystery to me. What is striking though is the fact that it does not sound thirty years old. Along with Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire she is one of the most celebrated female electronic musicians as well as an innovative minimalist. These three pieces were created using the ARP 2500 synthesizer. The sound coming through is like a mix of waves and the wind combined over a low hum/drone. The simplicity is gorgeous, the sounds repetitive but ever so slowly mutating. Actually I think its fairly pointless for me to attempt to articulate what is happening on this disc. You just need to close your eyes, open your mind, feel free and be taken away.... I returned as an amphibian... Erm this was the first stuff that she created since getting into Tibetan Buddhism and so it really does have a powerful meditative quality. This girl really shows the current wave of ambient droners how it should be done - 30 years earlier! I rarely use the word genius but it really does apply here. This is as pure as electronic music gets.

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Includes liner notes & archival photographs. On the suggestion of Robert Ashley, Douglas Dunn commissioned this piece from Eliane Radigue for choreography. Only the first part of Triptych was staged at the premiere at the Dancehall/Theatre of Nancy on February 27 1978.Recorded in the composer's studio in Paris.After the premiere of Adnos I in San Francisco in 1974, a group of French students introduced Eliane Radigue to Tibetan Buddhism. When she returned to Paris, she began to explore this spirituality in depth, which slowed her musical production up until 1978. Triptych marks her return to composition, and draws its inspiration from "the spirit of the fundamental elements", water, air, fire, earth....Eliane Radigue likes to add that this has often been useful to her in her moments of research and transitions. This three-part composition, with its great humility and contemplative simplicity, heralded a new period of work and was the first in a series of masterpieces inspired by Tibetan Buddhism: Adnos II (1980), Adnos III (1981), Songs of Milarepa (1983) - with the voices of Lama Kunga Rinpoche and Robert Ashley -, "Jetsun Mila" (1986), as well as the Trilogy of Death: Kyema (1988), Kailasha (1991) and Koume (1993).

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