Points of Balance and the Infra-thin in Éliane Radigue’s Endless Music

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines Éliane Radigue’s ‘musique sans fin’ (endless music) of 1968–1970. The period marks her development of acoustic feedback techniques for free-duration performance, where two or more tape loops are set into asynchronous, continuous mechanical playback. Drawing on interview material with Radigue, critical analysis of her ‘endless music’ works and my own study of audio feedback to identify technical details of her studio practice, I argue the importance of this short, relatively under-researched, but formative period of her composition. In the creative, musical use of acoustic, or ‘Larsen’ feedback, musicians control sounds that resonate in the space between a microphone and a loudspeaker under certain acoustic conditions and there is a thin point of balance between pure feedback tones and distortion. A similar fine balancing point is the basis of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infra-thin’ which refers to an almost imperceptible gap between two fluid states or experiences during the creation of a work of art. I have chosen to employ elements of Duchamp’s ‘infra-thin’ to guide my analysis of Radigue’s feedback techniques which are similarly based on an atomic, transformational fluctuation between different sonic conditions.