Alga Marghen

RADIGUE, ELIANE - Opus 17

2021 repress, remastered. "Alga Marghen very proudly presents Opus 17, a major turning-point in the sonic oeuvre of Eliane Radigue. Finished in 1970, it was the last work composed with feedback materials. From that experimental period, Opus 17 preserves a plastic character: a music made of rough sonic phenomena, at once harsh and granular, possessing a quality of materiality and tactility. Its vibrations structure the air surrounding the listener with densities, thicknesses, indeed with palpable movement. Her compositions are frames which let us hear these phenomena, open frameworks from the sonic installations of her Endless Musics and here reinserted in the five scenes making up Opus 17. In 1970, in her studio of very rudimentary means, she developed a completely unique body of work centered on sounds produced by feedback. Opus 17 has the quality of showing off the sum of the achieved techniques and methods. Eliane Radigues music has never been rooted in ideas but in practice, the intimate experience of things in the wild which she has known how to tame. This dialog both intense and poetic which she keeps up with the solid matter of sound finds a remarkable concretization in Opus 17. It is to be underlined that with Opus 17 Eliane Radigue inaugurates a technique of composition which will be her footprint, her trademark: imperceptible transformations. For that she has developed a technique of meticulous mixings, based on the slow passage from one section to the next. Imperceptible all during the piece, we pass, ceaselessly and without noticing the changes, from one frequency flux to another. Time is suspended, smoothed out, stretched. It is this technique which Eliane Radigue will be essentially using for all the electronic works to come and which she will never cease to refine and render always more subtle. Opus 17 is the great panoramic voyage through material sound, its electronic phenomena detailed as if in a microscope. As Rhys Chatham recalls: "Eliane Radigue (...) had just moved to New York and had the idea of acquiring an analog modular synthesizer, which is why she worked at NYU in order to try out the possibilities of the Buchla 100 series which we had there. One day, while gossiping, she invited me to her loft, which was just on the corner. She had me listen to a piece composed in France; the piece called Opus 17. (...) What I heard changed to course of my life as a composer. (...) That piece, impressive source of inspiration, gave the impression of being in a grand cathedral, both for the sensation of immensity of being in such a large cathedral, as for the effect of being so close to God." Opus 17 was created at the artistic center of Verderonne on May 23, 1970, for the F_ɬ™te en blanc (i.e. White Festival) organized by the visual artists Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Doroth_ɬ©e Selz and Jaume Xifra. Previously unreleased, Opus 17 is now issued on Alga Marghen in a first edition of 400 copies in a gatefold sleeve." - Alga Marghen.

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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
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