'Occam Delta XX' Film still 2023

Electronic music composer Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) stopped producing electronic music in 2001 and started creating collaborative works with instrumentalists under the name Occam Ocean in 2011. The creative process relies almost solely on oral and aural transmission: musicians visit Radigue at her home, to devise their parts collaboratively.

Expanding the cycle of Radigue's Occam Ocean acoustic works, 'Occam Delta XX' is a newly commissioned trio composition featuring Aura Satz (film), Rhodri Davies (harp), and Julia Eckhardt (viola). Radigue transmitted a new score image (or 'living score' as she calls them), an image associated with water, to film-maker Satz and long-term musical collaborators Davies and Eckhardt. Rather than producing a film that documents the music and sits outside of it, the film participates in the logic of the score and is developed in an open weave with the composer and musicians. Exploring a cinematic language that enacts the rippling effects of Radigue’s sound, the film diffracts musical gesture and shadow play into acoustic moire.

The new score has multiple modular iterations: as a live music trio between harp, viola and film; as a self-standing film screening; and as a duet between harp and viola, which is titled 'Occam River XXX'.

Credits

Directed, produced and edited by Aura Satz
DP Kate McDonough
Sound recordist and Sound Mix Jo Hutton
Colorist Philipp Morozov
Light operators Louise Grey and Aura Satz
Support-in-kind and location Mission Gallery, Swansea
Co-Commissioned by Courtisane Festival (Ghent), REWIRE festival (The Hague) and Variations Festival at Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), 2021-2023

Special thanks to Louise Grey, Jo Hutton, and Rhian Wyn Stone at Mission Gallery.

Thanks also to Sarah Jackson's Crossed Lines commission ‘Tone Transmissions’ (2020), which features the voices of Éliane Radigue, Julia Eckhart and Rhodri Davies, with excerpts from Radigue’s electronic work Kyema (Intermediate States), and acoustic works Occam I and Occam IV performed by Davies and Eckhart. Available to listen here: https://crossedlines.co.uk/tone-transmissions/

Screenings with Live Music

7 April 2023 World Premiere at REWIRE festival, the Hague

https://www.rewirefestival.nl/artist/aura-satz-rhodri-davies--julia-eckhardt

9 April 2023 Variations Festival, Le Lieu Unique, Nantes

https://www.lelieuunique.com/evenement/festival-variations-portrait-eliane-radigue-frederic-blondy-rhodri-davies-julia-eckhardt-aura-satz/

3 April 2025 Courtisane festival, Ghent

'Undercurrents 6 - Interwoven Scores: A Symphony of Correspondence'

An invitation to experience the resonance between cinematic scores and compositions by women composers.

Ferreyra, by Tamara García Iglesias and Xabier Erkizia, draws from Beatriz Ferreyra’s concrete music compositions, transforming them into a visual script that places sound at the center of the montage, where the image becomes a vessel for auditory exploration.

In Occam Delta XX, Éliane Radigue’s score, performed by Rhodri Davies (harp), Julia Eckhardt (viola) and Aura Satz (film), transforms the cinematic form itself into an instrument, a complex mechanism of translation where the surface of the film becomes as musical as the harp and viola that resonate through it. In Light Music, Lis Rhodes offers a score not in the form of notes, but through the abstraction of drawn patterns, black and white lines projected onto opposing screens, creating a visual symphony of sound and image.

Each of these works encourage us to rethink scores as living codes, forms that resist definitive readings, always in flux, and constantly shifting with every encounter. The scores are not merely heard or seen; they are felt, experienced, and reimagined. In these compositions, the spaces between sounds are as significant as the sounds themselves, urging us to listen, see, and engage in a continuous dialogue.

Curated by Ana Júlia Silvino In collaboration with EQZE — Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola https://www.courtisane.be/en/event/undercurrents-6-interwoven-scores-a-symphony-of-correspondence