“Tranamorem-Transmortem” is one of her best. Premiered at New York’s The Kitchen in 1974, the work fulfills the basic drone requirement of being, at a cursory aural glance, more or less the same through its course: several layers of electronics in a consistent hum. But even the most scant attention paid will elicit the depth and inter-twinedness of those layers: a throbbing low tone, three or four mid-range ones, each with their own aspect, a keening high pitch that seems to waver just beyond Radigue’s control. They not only pulse at different rates, none of them very regularly, but subtly alter timbres so that the waves formed by their varying amplitudes also take on slightly different character. This happens on an absolutely constant basis so, again, you have that tension between apparent uniformity and actual high complexity, impossible to concentrate on one or the other.
Some elements gain slight degrees of prominence for a few minutes, some subside, but essentially, “Transamore-Transmortem” simply occupies the room, breathing and very slowly evolving. The changes are like soft shadows of passing clouds traversing a form. After the work is over, one has the feeling of having experienced some 67 minutes out of a lifetime of a corporeal, sentient creature. Quite an accomplishment; essential listening.
