Caroline Profaner, Julia Eckhardt and Enrico Malatesta play the music of Éliane Radigue (IT/FR/BE)

In a joint effort between OUT.RA and REMAIIN, OUT.FEST was deeply humbled to present two pieces by the great Éliane Radigue who, unable to be present at the festival, handed over the demanding task to musicians deeply acquainted with her work. A legendary and unique figure in electronic composition, whose sprawling and visionary body of work started in the 50’s continues to this day, now focused on acoustic instruments.

In the first session we shed a light on her well known work for electronics, a living plane Radigue explored intimately for five decades. The first chapter of what is possibly her most majestic masterpiece – on par with ‘Adnos’? -, the ‘Trilogie De La mort’ composed between 1988 and 1993, ‘Kyema’ takes inspiration in the ‘Bardo-Thodol’ aka ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’. A unique and slow evolving sonic mediation on the continuous cycle of life and death, ‘Kyema’ will be spatialized at OUT.FEST by Caroline Profaner, a sound artist based in Brussels with a large experience in the fields of electroacoustics and acousmatic music whose work includes performances of pieces from such luminaries as Daphne Oram or Octavian Nemescu.

In the second session will take this most recent work as its focal point. A field Radigue has been working on exclusively since 2001 and that in comparison with the acclaim reserved for her electronic repertoire is still too underlistened and uncelebrated. A work in progress since 2011, ‘Occam Ocean’ is a series of pieces for solo and ensembles created with a particular player in mind, according to their sensibility, technique and relationship with the instrument – what Radigue calls her “Knights of Occam”. Presenting three pieces of this series, Julia Eckhardt and Enrico Malatesta are summoned to give shape to ‘Occam IV’ (viola solo by Eckhardt), ‘Occam XXVI’ (percussion solo by Malatesta) and, in a world premiere, ‘Occam River XXV’ for viola and percussion. Two musicians well respected by the french composer, with Eckhardt working closely to her in these past few years, in parallel to her work as co-artistic director of the Q-O2 space in Brussels and collaborations with greats like Pauline Oliveros or Taku Sugimoto. Malatesta has been, for some years now, a brave and bold explorer of the intricacies of percussion, discovering new approaches and relations, whose work has been documented by such labels as Second Sleep or Entr’acte.

These performances took place on October 4 and 5 in Barreiro as part of OUT.FEST 2021.