Eliane Radigue

Featuring: Robert Ashley

condition (record/cover): G+ (several marks making it click and pop throughout covering the music) / EX- (minimal wear) Éliane Radigue distilled decades of spiritual practice into Songs Of Milarepa on Lovely Music, setting the eleventh-century Tibetan poet-saint's verses for voice and her signature ARP 2500 synthesizer. Milarepa spent years meditating in Himalayan caves, transmitting Buddhist teaching through songs that disciples memorized and carried across mountains. Radigue, who studied Tibetan Buddhism under Pawo Rinpoche, approaches these texts not as exotic material but as lived practice.

The voice belongs to Robert Ashley's longtime collaborator Jacqueline Humbert and to Lama Kunga Rinpoche, whose presence guarantees liturgical authenticity. Radigue's electronics don't accompany the voices; they create the acoustic space within which voices can resonate, vast drones suggesting cave walls, mountain air, the silence between words. The synthesis techniques she'd developed across works like Adnos and Trilogie de la Mort here serve devotional ends.

Lovely Music, the American label that documented Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, and other experimentalists, provides appropriate home for work that belongs to no single national tradition. Radigue had moved from Paris to New York's downtown scene, finding there an audience receptive to durational music that European institutions often rejected. The LP preserves a marriage of electronics and spirituality that neither Buddhist tradition nor Western avant-garde could have produced alone, proof that synthesis extends beyond oscillators to encompass entire worldviews.