OCCAMs – Éliane Radigue & Carol Robinson

Two late works from the expansive OCCAM OCEAN series, OCCAM HEXA V (2021) and OCCAM DELTA XXIII (2025) were created for Ensemble Klang by Éliane Radigue & Carol Robinson. The works’ genesis dates back to a celebratory day of Radigue’s work at November Music Festival and FAQ Festival (Den Bosch) in November 2021, marking Radigue’s award of the Open Oor composition prize. The day climaxed with the premiere of OCCAM HEXA V, created for the six musicians of Ensemble Klang, it is a work rooted in the city of Den Bosch, with its waterways forming a map through the piece itself.

Éliane Radigue’s oeuvre, spanning over fifty years, displays an entirely personal attitude to time and development. The consistency in her musical language encompasses multiple media, from early feedback works created on tape in the late 1960s, through her most well-known compositions created on analog synthesizer (largely the ARP 2500), to her latest purely acoustic works (from 2005) created in close collaboration with a small number of dedicated performers.

Radigue’s music is almost instantly identifiable: durational; slowly evolving; meticulously crafted; often focused on just one or two precise elements; rigorously structured; and with sound itself as its musical subject. The music, while rooted in an experimental tradition, not only has the ability to transport but also to suspend, as if in some kind of waking dream. Therefore, it is not surprising that Radigue’s work, while existing outside of any boundaries of genre, speaks to such a wide audience. Throughout her extensive career, Radigue has continued to develop a sonic world that is both deeply personal and universal, creating works, irrespective of media, that focus on the subtle, the sensitive and the precarious within a vibrant continuum.

The works in the OCCAM cycle are expressions of collaborations of the closest kind, with scores transmitted orally, no manuscript paper involved, and often inspired by images from composers and musicians. As Carol Robinson says: ‘Unlike sections in classical music, there are no clear beginnings or endings, rather, qualities of sonic interaction that gently emerge and evolve. The images communicate expressive states to the musicians and are not meant to be decipherable or descriptive.’

Following a number of successful performances of OCCAM HEXA V, including in Paris (Fondation Cartier) and New York (Long Play Festival), the ensemble, Radigue and Robinson expressed a wish to add another work to the collection, this time a trio for the combination of percussion, trombone and baritone saxophone. OCCAM DELTA XXIII was inspired by the ensemble’s hometown of The Hague, in a location looking out across the North Sea, as expressed by Robinson: ‘observing wave formations, cycles, currents and colour shifts.’ The work was premiered in Wigmore Hall, at the London Contemporary Music Festival in January 2025, and is commissioned by Ensemble Klang, Wigmore Hall and the London Contemporary Music Festival.

OCCAM HEXA V and OCCAM DELTA XXIII were co-written with one of Radigue’s closest collaborators, the composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson. In addition to premiering over fifteen of Radigue’s demanding acoustic pieces, Robinson has co-composed several works from OCCAM OCEAN. Her hands-on work with the musicians of Ensemble Klang in The Hague, as well as her own compositional vision, remains instrumental in bringing this music to life.

During the Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam on 17 & 18 April 2026 the works were accompanied by Pavla Beranová’s lighting installation Everything is Vibration. The installation engages with daylight and its transformations over the course of the day. Certain frequencies set the black surfaces of the installation into vibration, like the surface of water. Everything is Vibration explores the idea that much of what surrounds us — especially light and sound — exists, at its core, as waves. What we perceive as stable, solid, or continuous is in fact in constant motion, unfolding through patterns of oscillation and rhythm.