En Veille

In French, en veille describes a machine that is powered but dormant — present, waiting. It also means to keep watch. A vigil.

This piece was recorded live at Desterro in Lisbon on 10 August 2024. It is a single, unedited improvisation performed in the venue's underground room, which turned out to be nearly empty. By the time I finished, only a few friends remained. I cannot recall a solo performance that felt more necessary or more free.

I had been carrying Éliane Radigue's work with me for some time. Earlier that year, I had been gifted Kate Molleson's excellent Sound Within Sound, whose chapter on Radigue became one of the most quietly transformative things I've read about music. Having grown up in French-speaking Switzerland, I'd been able to listen to Radigue speak about her practice in her own language for years — not through translation but directly, hearing the particular way she described her relationship with sound, as though it were something alive and deserving of patience. That understanding fed directly into my work on 2504, where I credit her as a specific influence, and it was still very much present in my mind the night of this performance.

What I brought to Desterro that evening was deliberately stripped back: a Moog Minitaur bass synthesiser, an octave pedal, a distortion unit, a freeze pedal, a delay, an EQ, and a mixer. No laptop. No pre-recorded material. No safety net.

For most of my performing life, I had worked with a computer and prepared elements I could reconstruct and recombine on stage. This was different. Radigue once described spending months with her ARP 2500, rejecting everything she didn't want until she found a tiny field of sound that interested her — and then she dug under its skin. With something so small and constrained, there was nowhere to hide. The octave pedal extended its reach into subharmonic territory, drawing out frequencies that sit at the edges of perception — the kind of partials and undertones Radigue spent decades exploring with her own synthesiser. The delay, with its feedback pushed high, became its own system of recirculation and transformation — a digital echo of the tape feedback loops she had pioneered in the late 1960s, where the material feeds back into itself and slowly becomes something else.

The invitation to perform came casually, during a visit to the office of my dear friends who run the label Colectivo Casa Amarela (CCA). They asked, and I said yes — quickly, deliberately, against every instinct that had made performing a source of dread for over twenty years. 2024 was a year in which I was learning to approach familiar things differently, to be present rather than defensive. The basement at Desterro suited this: a room below the street, below the noise, where the usual expectations don't apply.

Radigue often spoke of her music through the image of water. Looking at the surface of a river or a swimming pool, she said, you might follow the reflections, or you might let your gaze drift to the ripples on the bottom — what she called rêverie du regard, dream gazing. For L'île re-sonante, she described a lake-like structure: the first part reflected in the centre, which acts as a mirror, from which the third part emerges — from the depths as much as from the reflection. There is something in this that I recognise. I was born on an island. I grew up surrounded by the Atlantic and its depths. That room beneath Desterro felt like being under the surface of something — the city, the evening, everything that usually separates a performer from the sound.

At the time, I did not set out to make a piece about Éliane Radigue. I set out to play alone, with minimal means, beneath the city, and to see what would happen if I simply listened to what the sounds were telling me and where they wanted to go. That the result carries her presence feels less like a homage and more like a consequence — the natural outcome of spending time with someone's work so closely that it becomes part of how you hear.

Pour Éliane Radigue, 1932–2026.