With Occam Ocean 2 the cycle that Éliane Radigue began in 2011 moves from solos, duos and trios to a full orchestra. After the first volume with Carol Robinson, Julia Eckhardt and Rhodri Davies, Shiiin documents here a long work for ONCEIM, the Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisation Musicales founded in Paris in 2012 by pianist Frédéric Blondy, more than thirty players shaped, like every Occam piece, through direct oral transmission rather than a score.
The CD comes in a six-panel digifile with a 90-page booklet in French and English.
Occam Ocean 2 is dedicated to the homonymous work in progress (2011 onwards) by Radigue, "by nature unfinished because it is not complete": a real summary of her decades of research on sound as an autonomous and transcendent entity. After a few pieces for soloists ("Occam"), duo ("Occam River") and trio ("Occam Delta"), here we have a long suite for orchestra, ONCEIM (Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales) conceived and directed by Frédéric Blondy, already responsible for the recording of Gruidés by Stephen O'Malley, but whose repertoire also includes rarities of improvised and electroacoustic authors such as John Tilbury, Burkhard Beins and Jérôme Noetinger.
The ensemble is already anomalous in its instrumentation, which includes an accordion, three guitars, five clarinets and six saxophones alongside strings and brass instruments. As before, however, Radigue's approach and ultimate goal do not leave room for the more recognizable identity of the elements, aiming rather at the summation of individual "absolute" tones, ideally already accomplished in themselves.
More akin to Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening and Alvin Lucier than to the mysticism of the monumental orchestrations of Giacinto Scelsi (Quattro pezzi) and of the late Cage (number pieces), Éliane Radigue's recent work reconciles itself with the human dimension of sound creation and at the same time broadens its horizons, effectively demonstrating how much unexpressed potential lies in the DNA of classical instrumentation.
