Every year the above mentioned Auditorium organizes a review of various artists coming from electronic music and contemporary music called Inner_Spaces. This year, thanks to the Covid, the guys were not able to create a real review, organizing different concerts before a given date, so the only thing we as externals knew was that on September 20 and 21 there would be a performance of the precious piece of music L’Ile Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue.
The masterpiece of drone/ambient music by Radigue was introduced by a couple of shorter pieces of music by the younger composer David Monacchi, born in 1970 and disciple of Salvatore Sciarrino. Monacchi is developing since 15 years a project called “Fragments of Extinction”, where he exposes the sounds taken directly from nature (e.g. the sounds of the Amazon rainforest) in an attempt to preserve its purest sound forms.
First Monacchi piece was Stati d’Acqua for fields recordings (taken along the Tevere, the river of Rome, but also from a scanning of a six month foetus and the resonance of the fluid of a human body), while the second, part of the above mentioned Fragments of Extinction series, featured the sound of the rainforest in Brasil. If Monacchi research on site is remarkable, I can’t completely enjoy the result, even if it is not bad.
The way ‘real’ sounds intertwine themselves with electronic sounds, as an example, makes me think about the clarinet and the tape recorded dialogue in Stockhausen’s Stimmung, but the result here is that of a mere flux of the ones into the others and viceversa. Something we have listened to for about ten years at least. The way also Stati D’Acqua terminates, with a slow lowering of all the sounds, without any apparent reason, makes me think of a compositional cul de sac the composer didn’t took seriously.
Things don’t go that much better with L’Ile Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue. I think we have to deal, for once, with the given definition of the music: “drone-ambient music”. Yesterday night I heard very clearly all the drones, but it was not ambient music. I heard description of this work of music everywhere as a music created to impregnate discreetly the environment in which it is played. At the opposite, yesterday the volume was very high, at a point the structrure was resonating clearly and distinguishably.
I heard almost a long, prolonged piece by Sunn O))) maybe, instead of a composition by Eliane Radigue. I’m joking a little, but that was the feeling anyway. The good thing was that the drones were clearly audible, initially as a human heartbeat slowly beating, then the air was full of different textures the one mutating into the other until I was able to distinguish, with time, three different sonorous landscapes: the first drone movement, then a bunch of female operatic voices, then again another drone.
Two things came to my mind: the work of Mark Rothko, or at least a music transposition of it, and the Vipassana Meditation – I mean, the music was creating the right environment for it, so I closed my eyes and started a Vipassana myself. More prosaically, L’Ile Re-Sonante is the highest compositional point of Radigue as far as her work with the ARP 2500 synthesizer, and the best possible union of the different roots Radigue was referring to: European composers of noise music (Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari) and the american noise minimalists like Rhys Chatham, or Pauline Oliveros drone music.
Nevertheless the ‘acousmatic direction’ I have depicted, the work of Radigue is one of the most brilliant and important composers in contemporary music. I still hadn’t the opportunity to listen to her most recent stuff – I know she’s encountering several musicians to discuss the sound dynamics of their instruments composing music ad personam – but I’m sure it will be interesting in the future to immerse in her sound world. I so hope her research will be rewarded by brilliant results.
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