Before we get into the dispatch today, I wanted to bring some attention to a project that I’m very proud of. My wife, Alison Wielgus, has published her first book. It’s called Female Detectives on Post-Network Television: Mother, Maiden, Cop. Using post-network female detective television (e.g., Top of the Lake, Happy Valley, I May Destroy You) as her central archive, she examines how these shows interrogate ideas of race, gender, and transnationalism, among other ideas. She argues that while these interrogations can be fruitful, they inevitably fail to challenge the institution of the police or the practice of policing. The argument is obviously more detailed than that, but that should give you a good idea of what is going on. The book is very well written and beautifully argued. Her deep knowledge of the material comes through on every page. I know this because I have already read it. Her book is available through Bloomsbury, so you can find it wherever Bloomsbury books are sold.

When we think about minimal music, there are certain artists that come to mind: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, LaMonte Young, and Terry Riley. This is for a reason: they created masterworks that have entered the modern classical canon, pieces that sound as avant-garde now as when they were released. If I accomplish nothing else with this dispatch, I want you to think about Éliane Radigue in the same way as those men. With her recent passing at the age of 94, it is a good time to elevate her presence in the canon.

Over the course of 50 years, Radigue built an discography of searching, technically complex, and emotionally profound electronic and modern compositional music. You can hear her influence in the work of noise artists like Wolf Eyes; modern synth artists like Katelyn Aurelia Smith, Caterina Barbieri, and Julianna Barwick; and the genre of new age music, among other areas. When I started doing research for this project, I thought I had gotten way over my skis. On the contrary, I have had some extremely profound listening experiences.

When Radigue started working on music, she was working in Paris with Pierre Henry, creating musique concrète. Her interests did not lie there, but she was the apprentice, so she did as she was told. She stopped working with him for a period of time, learning classical composition, harp, and piano. When they reconnected in 1967, Radigue discovered an element that would inspire her music for decades: tape manipulation, particularly tape feedback.

She would pair this technique with the use of a modular synthesizer. While she tried your regular targets—the Buchla, the Moog—she settled on the Arp 2500.

This is the synthesizer that she would use for the entirety of her electronic career, which ran until 2004, at which point she started composing for acoustic instruments. She chose it because she thought it was the best instrument for creating music that unfolded. This is an idea that you can hear in her compositions.

If you pull up her compositions on any streaming service or Google them, the first thing that you will notice is their length. Éliane Radigue is many things, but one of them is not brief. Most of her pieces during her prime electronic phase run for at least an hour and do require a commitment on your part as a listener. The reason for this is evident if you consider one last element that deeply influenced her compositions: Tibetan Buddhism.

While I do not subscribe to the Tibetan strain of Buddhism, I have been a practicing Buddhist for about a decade now. In the practice, the aim is to live constantly in the present, to have purposeful movement, to acknowledge your connection to the world and universe. The only way that you can access these ideas is through the one thing that connects all branches of Buddhism: meditation, which opens the mind and eliminates the division between yourself and not-yourself.

Studying Buddhism can be confusing, as various elements are contradictory and the study methods, such as koans, are deliberately obtuse. However, when you calm your mind in meditation and focus on the simple act of breathing in and out, a kaleidoscope of experiences opens up to you. I feel like one of the highest compliments that I can give Éliane Radigue’s work is that it is the closest approximation to this process that I’ve ever heard.

A composition that bests exemplifies the process that I just described is Trilogie de la Mort, a three-part suite she released in 1998 that runs almost 170 minutes in length and that she spent four years composing. The first part, “Kyema,” cycles through the six intermediate stages that constitute being. The second part, “Kailasha,” represents the idea of a pilgrimage, and the last part, “Koumé,” emphasizes the transcendence of death.

Each part starts with a single tone. As time elapses, Radigue gently shifts the tone, changing the setting on a filter or adding a new tape loop/sound. Each one of these changes introduces a new depth and beauty to the overall construction. And as you fall further and further into the composition, new levels of complexity also unfurl; they were there the entire time but you could not recognize them. Just like in meditation, new elements appear as you connect more with the present moment through your breath. This does not happen immediately. These realizations occur slowly over long stretches of time. Many people consider this to be her masterpiece, and I am open to that argument. It is a stunning piece of music that pays tribute to her faith while providing a profoundly transporting listen for the audience.

While Trilogie is absolutely fantastic, my favorite works of hers is an earlier suite: the Adnos series. Released in three parts, Adnos sounds like a predecessor to much of what would come to represent the experimental underground of the 1990s and 2000s. With Adnos I (1974), you can hear the slow-moving drones and tone oscillations that presaged the work of groups that found themselves on Kranky at the turn of the millennium (e.g., Stars of the Lid, Charalambides, Loscil, Windy & Carl). In this composition, the sound can feel static, but that is only if one is not paying attention. Everything is constantly moving and shifting. It is a deeply fascinating listen.

In Adnos II (1980), you can start to hear the elements that would influence the ambient music being made to this very day by artists like Grouper and Claire Rousay, among others. In the four-part Adnos III (1982), there were times in the last two movements that I felt a touchpoint for the work of noise artists like Wolf Eyes and Nurse With Wound. While both of these artists took the ideas that are present in Adnos III to greater extremes, the use of repetition and the creation of doom via oscillation can be tracked back to this composition by Radigue.

After a few more pieces, Radigue took the ideas that she developed on the synthesizer and transferred them to acoustic instruments. The music that comprises the extensive Occam series is profound, complex, and deeply interesting. Radigue’s compositions provide a new way to hear these instruments both alone and in interplay. To show one side of this point, let’s look at Occam Ocean XIV, a solo harp piece:

In this piece, the harpist, Hélène Breschard, plays her instrument with her fingers, bows, mallets, and what looks to be a piece of magnetic tape while also playing percussive sounds on the frame. When I first listened to these pieces without watching a video, I thought that there was some sort of electronic manipulation in the process. There absolutely is not. The result of that realization is a new appreciation for the sonic abilities of the harp as an instrument, and a continual respect for what makes Radigue’s music dynamic and endlessly fascinating.

I realize that everything I just said makes the idea of listening to Éliane Radigue’s music feel daunting, like an academic exercise. It is not. But, it does require a lot of a person to put on one of her pieces and listen to it continuously from beginning to end. Given that I just finished listening to a lot of it in a short time, I will provide some suggestions for how to do this very thing.

While it is best to listen with full commitment for the runtime, we all know that’s somewhat impractical in our modern lives dictated by the strictures of late capitalism. Instead, you should put on her music at a volume at which it is constantly present, where it cannot completely fade into the background.

For example, I put her music on in an earbud that I kept at a volume where it wasn’t pounding my eardrum but I could hear the oscillations clearly. When I did this, I was able to get swept up in the sound and notice all of the subtle and major shifts that were happening across the pieces. I, on occasion, would be distracted, but my overwhelming focus was on the music itself, and sometimes when I lost focus, I would find myself in awe as I was in a completely new space from the one that I left. As I’m writing this, I have her music playing in this exact manner but on speakers rather than an earbud.

I also highly recommend putting her music on in a location where it can surround you. For me, this was in my car while I was driving around. The experience of being embraced by the music was amazing, further solidifying the respect that I had for her work. I could only imagine the profound feeling one got from listening to her music in a concert hall.

I hope that this dispatch has encouraged you to step out into the world of this master of minimalism. I think that if you like artists like the ones I’ve mentioned throughout this dispatch as well as someone like Tim Hecker, you’ll find a lot of value in Radigue’s catalog. If you do decide to dive in, please let me know in the comments.

As usual, thank you for reading. Please tell a friend and ask them to subscribe. Next week, I’m doing the diametric opposite of this week: we’re doing a Spins that I’m going to call “Women in Shorts.” I’m going for short songs and short albums. Ideally, it will be nothing more than 40 minutes total runtime, and I’ll keep the jamming to a minimum. And as the title suggests, only bands with women will get through the door. All-women bands will be preferred, obviously.

As always, take care of yourselves and each other. Pet a dog or a cat if they are cool with it. And, lastly, you are so much more than you know. Never forget it.

As a final bonus, here’s a brief documentary on Radigue and her process (you might recognize it from the still above):