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Éliane Radigue.
The Paris-born (1932) minimalist avant-garde, Radigue symbolises the early use of the synthesizer in musical composition. She was trained as a pianist before working beneath musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer and composer Pierre Henry. Her work is implicated in electronics introduction alongside her late 70's introduction to Tibetan Buddhism.
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"While many of her European contemporaries were slicing, splicing and shattering sound into recombined shapes and montages, she teased and caressed it into forms so large and tremulous their edges were seldom even glimpsed."
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This work meditates on the texture of Radigue's composition indispersed with spoken excerpts from Julia Eckhardt's long-form interview with Radigue published in the book Intermediary Spaces (2021).
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Butoh: Cradling Empty Space.
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In Japan two years ago I found a copy of Eikoh Hosoe’s Kamaitachi, a photographic study of embodiment in movement. A Japanese art commonly known within avant-garde circles as Butoh. butoh is the fluid gesture of the body, a graceful movement inside the soul. Hosoe’s rendering is erotic, visceral, an assault.
Butoh emerged in the 1960s, post-World War II. The dance was a rejection of Western influence within Japan focusing primarily on the body and Japanese Shinto sensibilities. this emphasis on the body contests Western materialism which proliferated post-World War II in Japan. Author and dancer Sondra Fraleigh describes Butoh as “a hybrid form of dance, linking physical and spiritual cultures from around the world.”
This recording is part spoken essay and testimonial and includes sound and performance excerpts from the documentary film Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis (2005).
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