Eliane Tapes is a series of music dedicated to the vast amount of work and the huge influence by Éliane Radigue.
For many musicians working in the field of drone (a term Radigue does not use for her music) and other forms of minimal music someway, known and unknown, the work of Eliane Radigue is an influence on what they are doing. With her work she did so many groundbreaking things that in modern electronic and electro-acoustic music her influence can’t be ignored.

With Vection we welcome Elif Yalvaç to this series of releases, with music inspired by Radigue her “L’île Re-sonante“. 

Vection

Ever since my childhood, women artists have been particularly inspiring to me. It started with rock music and electronica, evolving into where I am today.
When I first listened to “L’Île re-sonante”, it changed my world. That a woman created this and pioneered something timeless was mesmerising for me. I love this piece so much that I dedicated a whole episode to it on my podcast with Jono Podmore – Talk to the Chip.
The sonorities and harmonics that gradually evolve into a beautiful ethereal world of sounds with ARP 2500 and field recordings – simple but also sophisticated.
Then I further delved into the work of Eliane Radigue. She had been creating ambient electronic music long before the term “ambient” was coined. That she is still around us is such a valuable thing, and we should all make her feel that. I am honoured to contribute to this, even if it is little – the little I can do by getting inspired and creating a work as part of a series that has her name in it. It is truly an honour. Her music and approaches keep on inspiring mine. I am grateful that she exists.

Track titles have references to sky objects and physical phenomena as well as events that affect me in my life as I observe my environment, while listening to the sounds, sometimes alongside music such as those created by Radigue herself. These include dramatic facts and stories that happen to some sky objects. Each track is connected to one another. In this manner, they make a whole track together as in a concept album. I do not use a lot of equipment when I make music. I like to keep my setup minimal and make the best of limitations, pushing the boundaries. In doing so, I used my own Max/MSP patches to process the sounds, usually with granular synthesis, FM synthesis, and wavetable synthesis. I also used my Game Boy and electric guitar as my main instruments. There are also glimpse of field recordings blended with music. My absolute pitch means that I hear musical sounds in anything I hear or listen to and this influences my approach to field recording and everyday sounds, which is something I tried to capture in this album.

— Elif Yalvaç 

Reviews

Vital Weekly, Bauke van der Wal

Ambient Blog, Peter van Cooten

Moving Furniture Records, the unstoppable and persistent Dutch label for electronic and experimental music, runs a sub-series named Eliane Tapes. Named, of course, after Éliane Radigue, whose work inspired many artists in the field of drone or minimal electronic music. Éliane herself gave her approval to the series, which is a quality trademark in itself.

Elif Yalvaç‘s Vection is the seventh release in this series and is the first one released on CD (previous titles were released on cassette). Yalvaç holds an MA degree in Sonic arts (from Istanbul Technical University), and currently works in the UK teaching electronic music in London and Electronic Music Composition at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). She has always found inspiration in women artists, Eliane Radigue and the composition L’Île Resonante in particular.

Her music embraces opposites: ‘microsound glitches and slow builds; celestial beauty and abrasive energy’. While heavily influenced by (and dedicated to) Eliane Radigue, Vection is far more ‘dynamic’ (I could even say ‘dramatic’) than Radigue’s drone works.
To create her music, Elif uses MAX/MSP patches to ‘process the sounds usually with granular synthesis, FM synthesis, and wavetable synthesis’, also adding electric guitar, some field recordings, and sounds from her Game Boy.
The titles refer to ‘sky objects and physical phenomena as well as events that affect me in my life as I observe my environment’, and while the 33 minutes are divided into five tracks, they can (and should) be heard as one single composition.

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 Subjectivisten, Jan Willem Broek

Elif Yalvaç is a Turkish composer and musician currently living in the United Kingdom. She has been described as an ambient artist, but that does not do her work justice. Although you could classify the output under that heading, her music is full of contrasting sounds, which still go together beautifully and make it exciting. For example, abrasive sounds versus serene beauty, densely packed microsounds versus vast soundscapes and so on. She does this with guitars, synthesizers, laptop, field recordings and Game Boy, among other things. She uses this to create her idiosyncratic creations.

That is the case again on Vection, released on Eliane Tapes. It is a sub-label or actually series of Moving Furniture Records, dedicated to the enormous body of work and influence of Éliane Radigue, who was already making ambient music and drones before the terms existed. In her typical way, Yalvaç has created 5 compositions with the aforementioned instruments, which you will rarely recognize. The titles contain references to sky objects and physical phenomena.

The music is extremely minimal and veers towards ambient with drones, but when you really sit down for a moment you hear how subtle and rich it all is, full of glitches, electro-acoustic elements and the like. Sometimes even sounds, like in “Theia”, that nod to her more rock-oriented project Diaries Of Destruction, although here she blurs them and only uses them to shape her landscapes. There is a lot to discover in the silence. It has become a mesmerizing and sublime album, which otherwise fits perfectly into Radigue’s line.

5:4 , Simon Cummings

I sometimes wonder whether i’ve come to prize obfuscation in music more than clarity. When things are unclear, things get interesting, the ear and mind work harder, there’s potentially something to be discovered. This is one of the primary aspects that i’ve been revelling in when spending time with Turkish musician Elif Yalvaç‘s latest release Vection. At just over 32 minutes’ duration, it’s not a lengthy album, but what goes on within its five tracks feels substantial and, at times, epic.

The intangibility of its sonics extends to the connotations bestowed on it by the titles of those tracks, intermingling evocations of space, mythology, perception, and sound. Telesto is named after one of Saturn’s moons and a Greek water-nymph. Theia is a hypothetical planet (which, colliding with Earth, may have created the Moon) and a Greek goddess, responsible for sight and vision. Quaoar (or, strictly speaking, 50000 Quaoar) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt and an alternate name for the mythological figure Chinigchinix, significant to the Mission Indian peoples. Vection picks up the thread pertaining to the goddess Theia and refers to the illusory perception of movement when the body is actually stationary. The remaining track is called Harmonicity, a more generalised title but one that directly implies some kind of sonic relationship. It’s within the boundless boundaries of this complex array of allusive references that Yalvaç’s soundworlds are created.

Perhaps the most obvious trait, heard in every track and one of the key elements that drives the obfuscatory / allusive aspect of the music, is resonance, the perception that what we’re hearing is reverberation emanating from some unclear source. In many ways it’s how Yalvaç harnesses this that makes the music as tantalising as it is, since while specific details are often scant, they are there. Or, at least, there’s the impression that they’re there, traces of tangibility that either the ear catches or the imagination conjures. But it’s not all smoke and mirrors, a procession of atmospheres and fug; Yalvaç makes sure that some sonic elements are clear in terms of presence, even if they’re unclear in terms of identity.

Take the title track, for example, in which a series of powerful deep waves pass across. My ears tell me there are traces or remnants of bells in there, but they could be a fantasy resulting from the complex vertical agglomerations of hanging notes. Here and there a specific pitch pushes through – high scrapes and low tollings – but with each surging wave it’s as if the palette is wiped clean, and identity remains at a distance. Only in the final couple of minutes do some focused elements come through, shimmering before our ears. Even more nebulous is Theia, the shortest track on the album, where that idea that we’re hearing the resonance rather than the source becomes paramount. Here, the reverb is modulated by various distorted protrusions at the periphery. Nothing makes it to the surface, though in the track’s latter stages the intensity becomes gentle, allowing some soft, rather ghostly, melodic definition to appear, struck from right and left by fuzzy impacts.

A crucial aspect of the shared qualities of these tracks – one of the defining features of Vection overall – is crowded spaces, Yalvaç filling her soundscapes with a welter of diverse elements. However, the resultant density never feels overcrowded; the soundstage isn’t saturated, and as such, the music remains accessible, overwhelming without becoming overpowering. The best example of this is opening track Telesto, which quickly grows from nascent notions of line and cluster into a dense pitch space with juddering foundations and high circling tones. There’s a beautiful sense of balance maintained throughout, that density being militated against by both stasis – the music often holds position for periods of time – as well as short reposes where things are momentarily more sparse. But there’s really no let-up, particularly later in the track when noise becomes an integral component in the midst of a host of repeating, turning, cycling and tilting ideas, the whole glowing and throbbing. (Apropos: this applies to all of Vection, but Telesto especially should be played loud.)

Those bells i thought i might have heard in Theia come back again in Harmonicity, again as an implied presence resulting from piled-up tones. Yalvaç dials down both the density and the movement here, and while a sense of nebulosity remains, the implications of the title can be heard in the way that sounds seem to be resonating in sympathy with each other. Indeed, harmony becomes increasingly important; halfway through, chime-like timbres can be made out within the texture, and shortly after strong pitches burn their way to the surface. The bass falls away, and within a seemingly hot environment (some notes appear to be buzzing in the imaginary heat) a delicate oscillation emerges: a French sixth falling to a dominant. They rock back and forth, a gorgeous teetering toward a cadence that never comes.

The album closes with Quaoar, which at nearly 11 minutes is by far the longest track. It’s not so much a synthesis of what’s gone before as an extended exploration and summation of Vection‘s key behavioural traits, turning away from the (in hindsight, startling) clarity of Harmonicity in favour of more elusive, resonance-swamped material. That being said, Yalvaç does introduce the most tangible sound objects so far, in the form of electronic blips and patterns that squiggle through the dense viscous vapours, becoming swallowed up in slow waves that float according to no discernible gravity. The stillness and the slowness of Quaoar set it apart from the preceding tracks, at times raising the question of passivity. As elsewhere, though, the poise and balance of the music indicate active oversight, in which the occasionally tangible motes lead to an engagement the tension of which balances with the ease in the music. It’s as close as Vection gets to ambient, pulling and pushing us toward and away from its arresting but elusive soundscape.

Released by Eliane Tapes, a sublabel of Moving Furniture Records, Vection is available on CD and download.