OCCAM Ocean

For the past 20 years, Éliane Radigue has composed exclusively in collaboration with virtuosic performers from across the globe using a process of oral and aural transmission. In her OCCAM Ocean series, performers visit Radigue in Paris—first as soloists and later in combinations as ad-hoc ensembles—to create compositions based on images of water. These compositions come alive as they are performed, with sound travelling in unexpected ways, sometimes whispering in your ears and sometimes seeming to reverberate and resonate beyond the ears and into the mind and heart.  

Program: a selection of OCCAM Ocean pieces by Éliane Radigue

OCCAM XIX for 5-string contrabass

Louis-Michel Marion

OCCAM XIV for harp 

Hélène Breschand

OCCAM RIVER XIV for harp and 5-string contrabass

Hélène Breschand and Louis-Michel Marion

INTERMISSION

OCCAM V for cello

Charles Curtis

OCCAM XIII for bassoon

Dafne Vicente-Sandoval

OCCAM RIVER XI for bassoon and cello

Dafne Vicente-Sandoval and Charles Curtis

Charles Curtis is a cellist. His long creative relationships with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, and Tashi Wada have brought into being a body of distinctive works modeled on his cello-playing and performing persona. Naldjorlak (2003–2005) by Radigue is a concert-length solo cello composition made collaboratively with Curtis, in which the wolf of the cello functions as the reference for the tuning of the entire instrument. It is Radigue’s first composition for a live performer and an acoustic instrument without amplification or electronic support. Curtis is Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

“With a great meditative force and a musical richness nourished by very diverse sources, the music of Hélène Breschand manages to make us forget the specificity of her instrument in order to reach a singular universality” (Mouvement). International soloist, composer, author, performer in the field of creation, dedicatee of numerous pieces, she belongs to a generation of musicians eager for trans-frontal experiences. Exploring the fields of a total art, we find her in dance, cinema, theater and visual arts, with Eliane Radigue, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, The Dø, David Toop, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Caecilia Tripp, Christian Ubl…we find her with Elliott Sharp, in Imaginarium with Wilfried Wendling, and IRE with Kasper T. Toeplitz and Franck Vigroux. “If you still consider the harp an anachronism, just experience the range and power of Breschand in Le gout du sel” (The Wire). www.helenebreschand.fr

Louis-Michel Marion plays the double bass and the viola da gamba. He approaches these assemblies of wood, strings and horsehair as virgin lands from which to extract a sound material to model—material that he shares in projects of improvised music and/or contemporary writing, alone or in the company of a musicians, choreographers, authors, visual artists, and other poets of all practices. Fascinated by Éliane Radigue’s solo cello piece “Naldjorlak,” he contacted her in 2014. Since then he has collaborated with her in her monumental cycle OCCAM OCEAN, playing solos, duos and trios with clarinetist Carol Robinson and harpist Hélène Breschand.

Dafne Vicente-Sandoval is a bassoonist who explores sound through contemporary music interpretation and electroacoustic performance. Her research has translated into an intuitive investigation of the bassoon’s complex acoustical properties, embracing the elusive behavior of overtones as well as the countless possibilities in timbral shadings and idiosyncratic tunings. Her instrumental practice has led to the creation of a significant body of solo pieces in close collaboration with a handful of composers (Éliane Radigue, Jakob Ullmann, Alvin Lucier, Peter Ablinger, Phill Niblock, Catherine Lamb, Tashi Wada). A graduate of the Paris Conservatory and the Musik-Akademie Basel, Vicente-Sandoval currently lives in Paris. She has published essays in Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, Revue et Corrigée, Blank Forms and Sound American magazines. Recent releases include Ullmann’s Müners stern/Solo II on Edition RZ, Niblock’s NuDaf on XI Records and Minos Circuit on Portraits GRM/Shelter Press.