Beyond the Audible: Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM works and Inter/Listening

This article focuses on Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM compositions in terms of sound, space and relationships, arguing that a new type of listening is required to fully understand the sonic world that these acoustic works create. This listening requires an understanding that sound is but a single part of a larger vibratory network. As Radigue herself makes clear, sound is not only what is audible, but one range of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Adopting this approach to sound opens up a listening practice that is wide ranging in its possibilities, inviting links to other disciplines and artforms. Using theoretical tools derived from psychoanalysis and oral history, I propose that Radigue’s OCCAM works are enriched by a practice of ‘inter/listening', which is inspired by Alessandro Portelli’s delineation of the ‘inter/view’ as a place/process of mutual disclosure (Marshall 2018, 119; Portelli 1991, 31). Through inter/listening and a critical awareness of their own positionality, the listener is thus able to hear beyond the music to ‘listen’ to an expanded sonic attention.