Reception Weekend presents

Eliane Radigue:
Éliane Radigue is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.

Dominic Lash:
Dominic Lash concentrates on the double bass and electric guitar. He works regularly with musicians including John Butcher, Angharad Davies, Emil Karlsen, Mark Sanders, Pat Thomas, and Alex Ward. Solo bass compositions have been written for him by composers including Jürg Frey, Richard Glover, and Éliane Radigue. He has lived and worked in Oxford, New York and Bristol, and is currently based in Cambridge where he and N.O. Moore curate the monthly improvised music series Soundhunt. He also runs the label Spoonhunt.

Angharad Davies:
Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist based in London working with free-improvisation, compositions and performance.

Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation.

Much of her work involves collaboration. She has long standing duos with Tisha Mukarji, Dominic Lash and Lina Lapelyte and plays with Common Objects, Cranc and Skogen. She has been involved in projects with Tarek Atui, Tony Conrad, Richard Dawson, Gwenno, Roberta Jean, Jack McNamara, Rie Nakajima, Tim Parkinson, Eliane Radigue, Georgia Ruth and J.G.Thirlwell.

Most of her records are released on Another Timbre but she also has releases on Absinth Records, allthatdust, Confrontrecords, Emanem, Potlatch, ni vu ni connu and winds measure recordings. Her first orchestral piece was commissioned by LCMF in 2019.

Rhodri Davies:
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released eight solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.

For the last twelve years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing eighteen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.

”A tectonic plate of sound that evolves so slowly it seems to move and stay still at the same time.”
Pascal Wyse – The Guardian

Éliane Radigue lives and works in a second-floor apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. A weeping fig tree looms above her head; across the loft-like room are three large windows adorned with house plants. The windows face a school across the street which, she wrote in a recent email, “gives its rhythm to days, weeks and months.”

She has lived there for the past 50 years, steadfastly writing a great deal of slow, very minimal, mostly electronic music. The work of Radigue often seems static on first hearing. Her most famous piece, the Buddhism-inspired “Trilogie de la Mort,” lasts three hours and seems vast and empty. Yet zoom in on the musical material and you will find that each line is inching its way along, however deliberately.

“Time, silence and space are the main factors constituting my music… Shivering space, like a soft breath, induces the vibrations of the silence slightly, becoming sound.” (Eliane Radigue)
Hugh Morris – The New York Times

”Radigue is hailed as a landmark artist whose pieces set a high-water mark for the evocative and sensual potential of drones. To engage with her work requires close engagement with what her contemporary Pauline Oliveros termed “deep listening.” Her music is dynamically flat but endlessly supple, and one submits to the gentle force of the oscillations and the mesmerizing undulations of waves within waves.”
Daniel Martin-McCormick – Pitchfork

Produced by David Lacey & Aonghus McEvoy

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland

Reception, the long running Dublin-based series of concerts that focuses on cutting edge experimental music & performance will celebrate 9 years of activity with the second edition of ’Reception Weekend’ festival on February 14th & 15th at Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2 & Tengu, Dublin 1. 2025’s programme focuses on artists who explore temporality in unique ways & ranges from durational minimal compositions to ecstatic club music to free improvisation and outsider pop.

Since 2016 Reception has sought out new music & sound pieces which evade easy categorisation often blurring the lines between composition & improvisation, performance & installation. ‘Reception Weekend 2025’ is our most ambitious and wide-ranging programme to date bringing together composers and performers from 3 continents.

Over the course of the weekend Reception will present 4 concerts featuring Irish artists & musicians Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, Susan Geaney, Dunk Murphy & Aonghus McEvoy alongside legendary minimalist composer Eliane Radigue (performed by acclaimed instrumentalists Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies & Dominic Lash), Chicago footwork innovator RP Boo, New York experimentalists Jack Callahan & Jeff Wittscher, celebrated Japanese composer & sculptor Ryoko Akama and French guitarist & composer Clara de Asis.

Susan Geaney will present a new world premiere commissioned by Reception. The festival will also see the first Irish performance by RP Boo and the Irish premiere of Eliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.

Weekend passes available at www.receptiondublin.com