Onward 9.5
By Éliane Radigue
“Say you’re in your bedroom composing your new EDM album. ”
Then you upload it into hundreds of different music stores, in less than fifteen minutes, according to your internet speed. This is because you now have seventy years of musical research installed in your brand new powerful laptop. Everything condensed on a microchip that is more powerful than all the most advanced computers existing on earth in the early days of the "new electronic revolution."
We are covering a lot of music history in our journey here on Hip Hop Electronic. I immediately realized that what we are writing about is not only art but an electronic revolution. It started in the late 50s, and it brought us here today. As musicians, we are the result of it. And things are still progressing limitlessly.
An important part of this revolution happened at the Studio d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion Nationale in Paris, France, during the 50s and the 60s.
After WWII, research and development were keywords almost everywhere worldwide because humanity found new ways, approaches, and meaning to innovation. Music just followed.
Éliane Radigue's introduction to electroacoustic music started there.
Under the guidance of Pierre Schaeffer, she was trained on tape music techniques as a part of her education on musique concrète. The experience introduced her to the idea that any sound could be considered musical.
Around 1970, Radigue created her first synthesizer-based music and progressively abandoned her musique concrète research to make a slow, purposeful "unfolding" of sound through analog synthesizers and magnetic tape such as Buchla and Moog synthesizers.
Radigue then developed a particular interest in tape feedback techniques. It fit her sonic vision of minuscule developments over an extended time. Vice-Versa, etc…, which appears to be her last feedback loop composition, was conceived as a sound installation. Only ten signed and numbered copies containing a magnetic tape and a handwritten note were released in 1970.
In 2010, the independent American label Important Records reissued Vice-Versa, etc…, which was until then impossible to find online, and made it available via their website. The new version's tracklist consists of a tape played forwards and backward at four different speeds.
Two incredible coincidences occurred after the release of this work. The first one was about the style of the composition. Because of the nature of her career, Radigue is often considered a "drone" composer. The peculiarity of this installation is that it was composed before she started using the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which became her main instrument for the following 25 years. ARP 2500 had the sound she was looking for with her experiments and with her use of feedback and modulations.
The second one is that in 1974, four years after the installation, a group of visiting French music students introduced her to Tibetan Buddhism, a subject she naturally found fascinating and began investigating upon her return to Paris and in the following years. Vice-Versa, etc… was a meditation experiment without even knowing it.
