New Music From Éliane Radigue, Arthur Russell
Éliane Radigue
Occam Ocean 2
(Shiiin)
About her 1974 electronic piece “Adnos”, musician and composer Éliane Radigue wrote, “Moving stones around in the river bed does not affect the stream, but alters the fluid shape.”
To this writer, two things stand out about that sentence: 1) That it could apply to a great deal of Radigue’s catalog, and 2) That it is reminiscent of some nugget of wisdom from Eastern philosophy—coincidentally, the Paris-born Radigue began a deep interest in Tibetan Buddhism in the mid ’70s.
Now 87 years old, Radigue has spent the 21st century primarily creating for acoustic instruments, after several distinct phases of her career, first working with musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the '50s and '60s, then focusing on using feedback and tape loops, and then using analog synthesizers (mostly the ARP 2500) for three decades.
Her work unfolds gradually and purposefully, sometimes meditative and sometimes harsh, with shifting, complex drones that have great payoffs for patient, careful listeners.
Following last year’s Occam Ocean 1, which featured solo, duo and trio works, Occam Ocean 2 uses an orchestra, creating a piece that’s even more ambitious and more spellbinding than its predecessor.
Radigue collaborates here with Frédéric Blondy, a pianist and founder of ONCEIM (l’Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisation Musicales), the ensemble which performs the 52-minute work with strings, reeds, brass, guitars and an accordion.
The piece is a thick and nourishing mass of sound that slowly builds before slowly shifting its amorphous mass; a strange energy is at work here, often using dissonant tones and conveying moods that aren’t easily described.
Now let’s go back to that quote in the first sentence of this review, about the river stream; here, as hinted by its title, the music is an ocean of sound where differences can only be sensed in the collective level rather than the individual level.
It’s an unstoppable tsunami that takes its time to build its waves before crushing the shoreline with a rich ocean of bouillabaisse, to be both feared and savored.
Arthur Russell
Iowa Dream
(Audika)
In an alternate universe, one of the demo sessions that Arthur Russell recorded in 1974—with John Hammond of Columbia Records or Paul Nelson of Mercury Records—would have resulted in a life-changing contract, leading to a series of acclaimed pop albums and fame as a songwriter for even more famous singers.
Instead, Russell’s career largely stayed underground, and when he passed away in 1992 at the age of 40, fame and fortune eluded him; he left behind a huge, remarkable archive of material of which he compulsively revised, creating multiple mixes of individual tracks with no definitive final edit.
Interest in Russell’s work was revitalized around 15 years ago, with the release of the compilation The World of Arthur Russell on Soul Jazz Records and the creation of Audika Records, which was devoted to reissuing and unearthing Russell’s material, driven by Steven Knutson with the help of Russell’s partner Tom Lee.
Trained in the cello since a child growing up in Iowa, Russell never settled into a single genre; his dance-oriented work (released under names like Dinosaur L and Indian Ocean) perhaps brought him the most (relative) fame, but he created equally compelling and transcendental music in the realms of contemporary classical (documented on the compilation First Thought, Best Thought), pop (heard on the collection Love Is Overtaking Me), and the unclassifiable (the stunning voice/cello/echo-box work World of Echo).
The new collection Iowa Dream gathers tracks from the two aforementioned demo sessions in 1974 along with home recordings and other rarities, and it is nearest in spirit to Love Is Overtaking Me, being superficially closest to conventional pop songs.
Because Russell often left songs incomplete, Peter Broderick was employed for the challenging task of editing the Iowa Dream material, sometimes putting fragments from different takes together to make completed songs.
Russell’s collaborators included several underground notables, including Ernie Brooks (of The Modern Lovers), percussionist David Van Tieghem, Rhys Chatham and Henry Flynt, sometimes playing instruments that they aren’t known for playing.
Lyrically, Russell seems to celebrate or single-out the small moments of life, elevating observations—a movie’s ending that seemed “tacked-on” or the routines of his parents—and transforming them into art.
It’s not difficult to realize why Russell’s demo sessions didn’t lead to record contracts—his way of doing things is peculiar, and his oddly structured songs often have their own strange flow. But that’s one of the reasons why a new generations of fans find his work so fascinating and affecting.