Asymptote Versatile (1963-64), Éliane Radigue / various artists (Rhodri Davies)
tape 7: “Their heart grew cold, they let their wings down”, bBb (Scatter Archive)
L’ailleurs est ici, Browne / Guastalla / Sakhiri (Scatter Archive)
Weaving Waves, Eraslan / Thieke (Scatter Archive)
In 2011, French composer Éliane Radigue embarked on her Occam series – as she put it, musical ‘reflections on William of Ockham and … “Ockham’s Razor”’, an idea ‘expressed most succinctly in his own words, “The simplest, the best”’. These instrumental (and very occasionally voice) pieces were not scored in the conventional sense, but were created by the composer in dialogue with the performer (a process which has been compared to the Buddhist teacher/pupil relationship – Radigue had become a Buddhist in the mid-1970s). I mention these pieces because the preoccupation with the idea of Ockham’s Razor points to a preoccupation that runs through Radigue’s music, that is, our relation to the very nature of things, a preoccupation one might pursue through science, meditation or art.
Radigue began her creative career as an assistant to Pierre Schaeffer, assisting him in his work on musique concrète. Her own preoccupations, though, led her away from the use of recorded sounds to the use of electronics. From the mid-seventies, for the next twenty-five years, her compositions would be created exclusively using the ARP 2500 synthesizer. From the year 2000 onwards, she turned her attention to composing for instruments, something she’d not chosen to focus on until then, although she had created a number of scores in the 1960s including Asymptote Versatile, her first written piece and the only one from that period she chose to preserve.
In it, Radigue is preoccupied not with William of Ockham, but with Fibonacci. As it says in the notes to the album: ‘The graphic score comprises logarithmic curves devised from the Fibonacci sequence, superimposed over sheets of additional notation, to be performed as sustained tones by up to four groups of acoustic instrumentalists spanning the full range of the audible spectrum.’ Checking out the meaning of the title, I discovered that – according to Wikipedia – ‘an asymptote of a curve is a line which is tangent to the curve at a point at infinity’. I don’t know, but I’m guessing that perhaps the use of the word refers to the relationship between the logarithmic curves and the straight lines of the ‘additional notation.’
Asymptote Versatile remained unperformed for sixty years, until the harpist Rhodri Davies, who has worked closely with Radigue in the past (in particular, on the creation of Occam I and several of her later Occam River pieces) convened an ensemble which included many of the other Occam soloists who had also worked closely with Radigue, to perform the piece at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2023. What we have here is a recording of that first performance.
What struck me, listening to it, is how, just as the creation of Radigue’s later pieces relies on the active participation of the performer in the process of making them, so the appreciation of her music demands the active participation of the listener. If we approach it expecting to be entertained, we’ll soon find ourselves distracted. However, if we approach it expecting to be – and prepared to allow ourselves to be – we’ll find ourselves drawn in. And what a world to be drawn into: lasting just over forty minutes, Asymptote Versatile is a monumental landscape comprising of huge, endlessly-absorbing rafts of sound.
Sometimes, in life, we come across ways of seeing and thinking that energise us not because they’re new to us, but because they resonate with what we’ve felt all along. Asymptote Versatile was written about a decade before Radigue became a Buddhist, but, listening to it, it’s hard not to think the curve of her life was always destined to intersect with the straight line of Buddhism.
This is an important recording – indeed, the only recording – of an important piece, made by musicians closely acquainted with the composer and her ways of working. An essential listen.
The title of Ola Rubin and Martin Küchen (aka bBb)’s latest album, tape 7: “Their heart grew cold, they let their wings down”, is a quote from Sappho. Tapes 1-6 (archived in the Scatter Archive) are all assigned quotes as titles, from sources as diverse as Lenin and Edmund Burke. If a theme runs through them, it’s the need for us as a species to overcome fear to attain freedom. The use of the word ‘tape’ in the titles refers to the fact that all the performances were recorded on a reel-to-reel tape machine, using old, heavily degraded tape.
As for the music itself, Rubin and Küchen have a dry deadpan approach to creating it. They play trombone and sopranino sax respectively, although other noise-sources find their way in. Sometimes they soliloquize, at others they converse, both speak at once or address us together. You could describe what they do as understated clowning (something that comes across in the short video which accompanies the album) with a Beckettian aversion to resolution. You get the feeling they could always simply pick up from where they left off: to adapt a cliché, how long is a reel of tape? As for how they see the music, they have described bBb elsewhere as ‘everyday music for distracted times… for our leaking Now.’ However you describe it, it’s an addictive listen. One looks forward to tape 8.
The main part of the notes that accompany L’ailleurs est ici is described as ‘a corruption’ of American novelist Donna Tartt, a text dealing with how difficult it is to pin down the effect music has on us. I’ve not read any of her books, but I was left feeling curious. Looking into what she’s written, I came across another thought of hers, which included the unoriginal – but no less true for that – observation that ‘music is the space between notes.’
Funnily enough it was one of the first thoughts I’d had while listening to the music on this album. A single, continuous track, it’s often very much about sounds and the space – or lack of it – between them, not just about the streams of melodic consciousness one can create when improvising. I felt it, too, to be all the time harking back to the kind of adventures in sound people embarked on in the twentieth century. In places, the use of voices has overtones of both Stockhausen and Ligeti.
L’ailleurs est ici lives up to its title: Mark Browne, Bruno Guastalla and Nini Sakhri have indeed bought elsewhere to us (wherever our ‘here’ might be). They’ve created together just the kind of challenging but engaging album one expects to find in the Archives of Scatter. It’s more than well worth a listen.
weaving waves is an engaging dialogue woven from Anil Eraslan’s cello and Michael Thieke’s clarinet. It has a refreshing simplicity of purpose about it, summed up in the single-word titles of the tracks, which, taken together, adapt the famous statement from John Cage’s Lecture On Nothing. There are fourteen all together – mostly very short – and, as it says in the album notes, they ‘represent the entire recording session, in the original sequence and without any editing, as if it was a concert without an audience.’ The result is forty minutes in which both players – seemingly effortlessly – remain ‘in the zone’, revealing to us the sonic artefacts they discover there. To complete the adapted Cage quote, music as we need it.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Asymptote Versatile (1963-64): https://rhodridavies.bandcamp.com/album/asymptote-versatile-1963-64
tape 7: “Their heart grew cold, they let their wings down”: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/tape-7-their-heart-grew-cold-they-let-their-wings-down
L’ailleurs est ici: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/lailleurs-est-ici
Weaving Waves: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/weaving-waves