Cargo Records

Adnos I-III

"Suddenly wonder why you didn't notice the change"

"Eliane Radigue has composed for magnetic tape and electronic media since the late 1950's, when she studied with both Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. From her independently built Paris studio, Ms. Radigue creates an organic ambience within which sound moves in a continual flow around the listener. Composed between 1974-1982 and previously unreleased, the Adnos cycle presents a delicately continuous transformation, a fragile sonic texture. Ms. Radigue, inspired by the idea of moving water as metaphor for sound in motion, writes, 'In the conch formed by sound waves, the ear filters, selects and emphasizes some areas of hearing, just as one's eyes would look at the shimmering of water: at the same time absent and multiple, oriented toward an outside whose image lives reflected in the inner universe.' 'A lot of the best new music can't be captured in sound bites -- you have to listen for a long time. Of no one is that truer than Eliane Radigue, who lives in France, but whose unarticulated time sense brings her closer to La Monte Young in sensibility than to anyone in Europe. Listen to her exquisitely-sculpted electronic works for two, three, even seven minutes, and you may hear nothing but a drone. But over a far longer period, her electronic drones thicken, begin to pulse, and change into complexly gritty textures so gradually that you suddenly wonder why you didn't notice the change. Over the long haul her works crescendo into glacially slow climaxes, bristling with harmonics, inducing in the listener an altered state of ecstatic spirituality.' --Kyle Gann"