Shivering Space, Like a Soft Breath

Personally I’m always on the look for slow, quiet, drone-y music to incorporate into my ritual work. I’ve got quite the extensive collection.  But I’d never come across composer Éliane Radigue until the NY Times ran a piece on her last month.

A compilation of her feedback works is posted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_3Fu8YfSdI&feature=emb_imp_woyt

The NY Times pieces begins:

“Éliane Radigue lives and works in a second-floor apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. A weeping fig tree looms above her head; across the loft-like room are three large windows adorned with house plants. The windows face a school across the street which, she wrote in a recent email, ‘gives its rhythm to days, weeks and months.’

“She has lived there for the past 50 years, steadfastly writing a great deal of slow, very minimal, mostly electronic music. The work of Radigue, who turned 90 on Jan. 24, often seems static on first hearing. Her most famous piece, the Buddhism-inspired ‘Trilogie de la Mort,’ lasts three hours and seems vast and empty. Yet zoom in on the musical material and you will find that each line is inching its way along, however deliberately.

“’Time, silence and space are the main factors constituting my music,’ she wrote in an interview conducted over a series of emails. ‘Shivering space, like a soft breath, induces the vibrations of the silence slightly, becoming sound.’

“She added that ‘this natural way of working — slowness — takes a long time, of course,’ and that she works ‘inside of time.’