Magnetic Oxide, Electricity and Tone Generators.

Listening to Eliane Radigue’s Adnos I-III, the room is humming at a low end frequency. The air produces heat wave shimmers like those surrounding mirages. I put my hands against the loudspeakers and my fingers bump and jump spontaneously off the woofers. Drones on drones on drones on drones all slip over each other and fill up the air. It’s hard to know if you are diving into the sound or if it is swallowing you up.

Somewhere inside my bones molecules bump into each other. Somewhere in the galaxy, a scientist is thinking about atomic fields, particles and localised excitations and wondering if the maxim “position is an operator in QM but is a parameter in QFT” actually applies when sound becomes a liquid.

Inside the drone, nothing much changes, except when you stop paying attention. Then particles are destroyed in space, new noises come out and the reco/r/dings are the temporary documents of where you were in place and time as it happened: 2002. In the San Francisco Zen Centre zendo, the air is agitated by the thousands of people who have sat on cushions, breathed in, breathed out and entered the drone. They do this everyday at the same time, in the same place.

Meanwhile, Eliane Radigue sits at an ARP 2500 with a Tibetan singing bowl and a Tibetan Thanga painting framed on the wall. She is a Parisian woman in her 70s.