Technologies of Hypnagogia: Altered Perception and Religions in Avant-Garde Electronic Music

Abstract

One important element of twentieth-century avant-garde composition is the intersection between advances in technology and transformations in religious consciousness and experience. This piece argues that the lineage from John Cage through Pierre Schaeffer, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Eliane Radigue, and William Basinski make for a compelling addition to the study of religion and sound/music.

“The sky is only an antenna with a wide range.”—Andre Breton

There is no entry for “electricity” in the Encyclopedia of Religions, which skips directly from “election” to “elephants.” The role of electricity in religious traditions appears, on first consideration, to be minimal, but fascinating. Perhaps ancient humans, responding to the terrors of atmospheric discharge, imagined their gods astride the heavens as authors of these flashes. Note, some millennia later, the avatars of disenchantment, inventing technologies to capture and measure and explain a world once thought be overrun with spirits and angels. The term’s etymology—used by early modern physicians and scientists, with roots in Indo-European and classical cultures—lends itself to an alchemical interpretation, referring regularly as it does to the transmutation of elements into gold. Some religious traditions engage electricity via prohibitions, as with the old order Amish or Jewish observers of the Sabbath. Still others have venerated its utopic possibilities, as with the Oneida Perfectionists’ reverence for the telegraph or the Moody Bible Institute’s exuberant science films. Pioneers like Nikola Tesla are discussed in tones usually reserved for the prophet, and likewise one encounters religious investments in the potentialities of artificial intelligence or consciousness in the cloud.

There is, however, a story to be told about electricity as a current of religiosity itself. Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born into a family of Northern Italian nobles in 1745.1 Something of a polymath, Volta was fascinated by the makeup of gasses, and became obsessed with Benjamin Franklin’s writings on “flammable air.” Pursuing the elements that would result in such a phenomenon, Volta is actually credited with discovering methane. He is most famous, however, for his pioneering work in electrical capacitance, studying the effects of charge and potential, and doing so by way of the standard unit of electrical potential named for him, the volt. He invented the electric battery, initially called the Voltaic pile. With this invention, electricity was no longer the province only of nature gods or heavenly wrath but something that existed independently in objects, which humans could now analyze and even use.

With the right elements, connected with the right wires, new possibilities and potentialities can be unleashed. Anode and cathode become shorthand for transformation, where surfaces dissolve into charged ions and interiors store electrons, or where the presence of zinc inside an electrolyte converts charged into uncharged hydrogen molecules. Volta adduced such discoveries to “the special mercy of God” and to “those human means which confirm belief” through testing not only theories of natural religion or arguments about the probability of religious events to have occurred but the probe of the innermost reaches of the kingdom, the spark of the divine or the tongues of fire lapping the skies.2

Such juxtapositions of the experimental and the known are central to the development of electronic music in the twentieth century. Further, it is widely known that religions have often employed sound and music to induce practitioners into perceptual states wherein they can more easily achieve insight, revelation, or other transformations of the self. The study of religion has for several decades attended more rigorously to the sensorium of religious experience, including attention to sound and music. This has led some scholars to call even further for what Rosalind Hackett calls a “more sonically aware religious studies” (see Hackett 2016; Bivins 2016). This piece makes a contribution to the study of sound and religion by exploring the use of electronics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde composition. This exploration, I contend, resonates with the steady expansion during this same period of the category “religion” itself, which cumulatively broadens our understanding of sounds therein: the expansion of what is possible within religious traditions, the creation of new modes of mediating religious experience, the exploration of new objects or materialisms, attention to religious affect, or the increasing fuzziness of the boundary holding apart secularity and religion.3 To examine this compositional lineage, particularly its use of electronics to induce new states of perception and consciousness, is to see how the study of sonic religion is also the study of material religion. What is more, studying them as a group gives us a way of thinking through the field’s recent concerns to a perhaps broader understanding of religious experience. It is common to examine practitioners in religious communities for examination of music and objects. But in the outer reaches of sound, we can identify a convergence of themes which reveals (and gives scholars a new language for interpreting) different media by which music-makers and audiences think about and interpret “religion.”

The lineage I trace below begins with John Cage’s early forays into electronic sound, combined with his interest in Asian religions, giving us a way to think about the sonic habitus of religion. I proceed from there to investigate Pierre Schaeffer, whose innovations in tape music and his use of pre-Socratic thinking mark a suggestive entry in the story of material religion. Turning next to one of Schaeffer’s students, Pauline Oliveros, I explore how the use of electronic drones and installations captures mid-twentieth-century interest in religious eclecticism and new metaphysical modes of consciousness. American composer Alvin Lucier pushed further against the settled limits of “religion” in his investigations of monastic contemplation and altered consciousness by means of devices that amplify the human body’s own electricity. Lucier’s experiments raise questions about whether transformations of brains and bodies wrought in this way are secular, religious, or something else. French composer Eliane Radigue’s pursuit of pure drones, through her own practice of Tibetan Buddhism, reveals not only the increased embrace of non-Western religions in pursuit of religious insight, but close attention to the kinds of listening practices at the heart of many sonic religions. Finally, William Basinski’s compositions explore decay, the background radiation of the cosmos, and Catholic liturgy, with an interest in producing states of reverence in listeners themselves.

Linking each of these cases is the category hypnagogia, which is typically understood as a transitional state between waking and sleep. In the study of religion, it has been linked to the expansion of consciousness, receptivity to divine influence, and an openness to spiritual presence. The musicians discussed here evoke these themes as resources for creativity and means of expanded spiritual awareness simultaneously (see (Powell 2018)).

This investigation, then, opens up in sonic religious studies a way of hearing multiple themes taking shape in lived religion and in the study of religions broadly speaking. In this transatlantic lineage, electronics and noise become the media for thinking about religious experience, technology, and music outside of institutional and conceptual convention. The advancement of electronic music over time is, aside from its musicological properties alone, a developmental arc that traces a changing religion, which of necessity requires sonic awareness to understand it.4

1. New Machines in Twentieth-Century Sound

German composer Walter Zimmerman (1949–present) claimed that it was John Cage (1912–1992) who taught him “to see technology as something which can bring our attention back to nature.”5 Long before the technological riot of twentieth century life made its inevitable impact on “classical” music, there emerged a genealogy of speculative thought invested in divining the relationship between the generative energy of the cosmos and earthly music. Socrates, for example, is often remembered for his conviction that music ought to be sternly regulated in a just republic, so as to avoid notes and intervals that might distort one’s moral sense. He is, however, less commonly recalled for “engaging transformative silence steeped in thauma—wonder”(see (Michaelides 2018)). Long before Volta, speculative thinking and religions pursued techne by which humans could expand, ascend, or intuit the mysteries of the cosmos. Thinkers ranging from Pythagoras to Cicero, Boethius to Ficino, and Plotinus to Fludd, all posited the existence of a prima materia inherent in the universe, which could be understated and notated musically, in ways meant to facilitate awakening and insight among the adept.6

The differences among these thinkers are important, of course, but in varying ways each was intent on exploring a universe they understood to be fundamentally vibrational. Whether observing the growth of plants, meteorology, astronomy, or intonation, humans have consistently explored the possibility of attuning ourselves to this vibratory force, in hopes that such connections might expand, enlighten, transform. In terms of this essay, of greatest significance was the revival of esotericism and Hermeticism during the Renaissance. Francisco Giorgi’s 1525 text De Harmonia Mundi posited that from the mind’s perception of correspondence between music and the heavens, the aspirant could ascend a ladder up to God. Interest in the texts of Agrippa and Hermes Trismegistus was integral to these ideas’ circulation, with the latter holding that the “soul is like a monochord on which the wind from the dawn of time tries to play its essential harmonics.”7 This notion extended Pythagoras’ understanding that “vibration proved the primacy of ideal numbers” and that one could “demonstrate integer ratios in the harmonic series using a monochord (Breeze 2010, p. 12).” Those who embraced such thinking imagined a wide range of experiences, from trance states to astral travel, that might follow if humans entered a correspondential relationship with the vibrational cosmos.

As composer William Breeze notes, this way of imagining human experience can be found in examples as far-flung as astrological maps, Kabbalistic signs, and the visual map of the diatonic scale (Breeze 2010, p. 23). Even in the modern era, in a different zone of human religio-magical speculation, Emmanuel Swedenborg rhapsodized about angelic choirs and the music of the spheres, vast sonic realms of information waiting to be heard via scales, drones, and sympathetic frequencies (see (Schmidt 2000)). They are borne on the air, the thinking goes, detectable via human devices both biological and constructed, such as the Aeolian harp. In the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau referred often to what he called “sphere music,” drawing on his admiration for Pythagorean thought and redescribing it as potentially eruptive, disturbing, a force that enabled the submission of everything to inexorable nature.8

What machines could facilitate this religious overwhelmedness? The Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) invented a series of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori. Performing a series of concerts just before and after World War One, Russolo understood the emergence of noise as part of a larger history of music and divinity. In “The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto,” Russolo wrote that the “evolution of music is comparable to the multiplication of machines, which everywhere collaborate with man.”9 The unfolding of sound in time was, for Russolo, the development of sound’s relationship to the universe; new machines could thus harness information that would facilitate human self-discovery and exploration, just as Volta had done and just as religions have long practiced. Russolo and the Futurists understood themselves as creating a new art designed for “living in the new age of technology, cities and mass warfare (Hegarty 2009, p. 13).” Bridging the gap between noise and music, then, might produce new states of consciousness and perception appropriate to these changes.

Since then, from the theremin to the Buchla synthesizer to the no-input mixing board, electronic composers have used technology to transform or evoke sounds that are mostly inaccessible via traditional musical instruments. In ways similar to geomancy, earth magic, or alchemy, these composers use electromagnetism as a medium of communication, though usually not of “expression,” tethered as that notion is to modernist conceptions of compositional agency that many of these composers discredit. Few did so as eagerly as John Cage, clearly the most renowned “avant-garde” composer, who—despite that recognition—is often poorly understood.

2. John Cage’s “Indefinable Materials”

Cage’s initial musical desire, one that became widely shared in the early twentieth century, was to escape the prison-house of tempered music and conventional rhythm (see (Brown 2006)). Cage became an early advocate of using radio and other electronic devices in the service of such liberation. It is a move that is fascinating to consider in terms of the history of religious objects produced and manipulated so as to achieve new experiential states: planchette, seer stones, sacred rattles, and more. While Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) and Ernst Toch (1887–1964) had incorporated turntables into composition as early as 1930, Cage’s 1939 piece “Imaginary Landscape No. 1” marked a radical turn in contemporary music. Intended for performance inside a radio studio, the piece features likely the first ever example of live-mixing between hand-modulated turntables and conventional instruments (Ross 2007, p. 397). Despite the significance of such innovations, and while Cage often disparaged musical convention, he was rarely wholly dismissive of two of music’s traditional functions: imitating the operations of nature, and helping induce mental states open to divine influence. Cage sought to tether these functions to “things that are inexplicable,” so that their potential could be more fully unleashed (Duckworth 1999, p. 21).

Particularly during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was famously conversant with D.T. Suzuki during the latter’s visits to the United States, Cage worked with the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, which produced “an enormous heap of tape fragments, which were distributed in six categories: city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, manually produced sounds, wind sounds, and ‘small’ sounds (Ross 2007, p. 402).” As he composed “Fontana Mix” and “Williams Mix,” Cage took these assembled sounds and subjected them to chance operations using the Chinese divinational text the I Ching. These and other radio pieces (“Imaginary Landscape No. 4” was for twelve of them at once) evoked astonished reactions from the musical establishment and, even for contemporary interpreters, resist closure: music critic Alex Ross hears in “Williams Mix” “the air of a world gone berserk, of modernity imploding on itself (Ross 2007, p. 402).” Yet “modernity” and chaos were not the point; as David Toop aptly put it, “Cage was subjecting the identifiable materials of art to a process which transported them to sacred domain (Toop 1995, p. 142).”

Cage’s interest in the “sacred domain” was not limited to his relatively early fascination with Zen and the I Ching. He later studied Basho somewhat rigorously, and became interested in the aesthetics of haiku. Through his subsequent engagement with Hindu traditions and Ramakrishna, Cage also became fascinated by the interplay between nirvana and samsara.10 In his essay, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy,” Cage described the broad religious and psychological import of his approach.

“[G]oing inwards with reference to the structure of his mind to a point in dreams, following, as in automatic writing, the dictates of his subconscious mind; or to a point in the collective unconscious of Jungian psychoanalysis, following the inclinations of the species and doing something of more or less universal interest to human beings; or to the ‘deep sleep’ of Indian mental practice—the Ground of Meister Eckhardt—identifying there with no matter what eventuality.”11

Cage was effectively proposing new methods for capturing sounds from the ether, staging ongoing events rather than static, finished work. Electronics thus represented an overcoming of categorical limits and a greater integration of music with other domains of life, which in Cage’s case contained strong evidence of the sort of mid-twentieth-century religious eclecticism often associated with this time period. Yet something more seems to be at work: Cage, by incorporating objects to disrupt religious and musical convention, was enacting a series of powerful changes to religion’s sonic habitus. More than conventional emotional states or liturgical purposes, the direction of this music was to render unstable expectations for religion itself.

As he pursued work with mixed media, contact mics, and more, Cage—aware of his influence on the composers who would follow him—said with almost messianic zeal that the use of noise “will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.”12 Indeed, the further Cage became involved in the use of electronics (in both research and composition) the more prophetic his tone became. Cage and his contemporaries had consistently sought out physicists and theorists like Karl Jansky of Bell Labs, who built massive antennae to listen to deep space. As Douglas Kahn writes, for all the Cold War context of striding purposefully into a techno-future, for Cage “[m]etaphysical and physical environments were most often supplanted by an ether informed by occult practices or an older period of physics (Kahn 2013, p. 145).” The use of objects is significant in accomplishing this rearrangement of religion’s sonic habitus. As S. Brent Plate, Birgit Meyer, and others have shown, religions can be known and experienced through this particular dimension of materiality, not simply as supplements to embodiment but—in the works of Cage and his descendants—extensions of it, insofar as they are conduits to the larger cosmos pouring into circuitry and ears (see (Houtman and Meyer 2012; Plate 2014)).

3. Pierre Schaeffer and Sacred Objects

Following Cage, there arose in Europe and North America a strain of avant-garde music that provoked consistent questions about what precisely music was, often doing so through suggestive invocations of religious traditions and attempts to produce religious experience. It became common to turn to new materials, or non-standard instrumentation, to create this new music. It is suggestive to look back to this period from the perspective of religious studies since 2000, when David Chidester announced a “new materialism” in the study of religion (Chidester 2000). Since this period, humanities disciplines have seen a revival of interest in older philosophers like Henri Bergson as well as a dissatisfaction with the relative inattention to materiality outside of embodiment. Whereas older theories of late modernity might have focused on materiality as a vehicle for transference of sentiments left in the wake of cultural “disenchantment,” theorists like Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, and Daniel Miller have produced new ideas by which to assess people’s emotional investments in the media by which they simultaneously generate experience, religious and otherwise (see (Bennett 2010; Latour 2005; Miller 1998)).

In the mid-twentieth century, French composer Pierre Boulez introduced Cage to Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995), whose studios and compositional endeavors were funded by the French government, out of an interest in progress and the art of the future. Schaeffer was far less invested in chance operations but shared with Cage the Pythagorean interest in harnessing sound both from a musical cosmos and from the din of modern life. Indeed, Schaeffer wrote explicitly, in “Acousmatics,” that he understood himself to be reviving the Pythagorean school of discipleship, focused on attentive listening to silence so as to discover not a permeating sonic medium but what he called the “sonorous object.”13 Schaeffer insisted that this “object” was not in the magnetic tape he meticulously assembled in his compositions but in the intentionality of listeners. The possibility of new experiences emerging through new devices was, for Schaeffer, precisely the value of such modes of attentiveness.

Certainly, the scholar of religion could point to the regularity of intense listening practices across religious traditions, ranging from various monasticisms to meditations in nature or attunement to Quranic recitation. Something else, however, is at work in Schaeffer’s manipulation of the object to recombine sound into new and often unsettling combinations, which confront the listener with their constructed and manipulated properties rather than concealing them. When interpreted in light of Schaeffer’s interest in contemplation and presence, such a reassemblage “raises fundamental questions because religion has so long been imagined to stand in radical opposition to matter and materiality (Houtman and Meyer 2012, p. 6).”

As the critic and composer Michel Chion points out, Schaeffer’s attention to how sound is mediated—by device, by context, by subjectivity—is intended to promote an awareness of one’s situatedness in time (Chion 2016). From Schaeffer’s first piece (constructed from recordings of trains) to his immersive Mass for the Present, he intended to harness and order sounds in a way that would enhance the listener’s experience of time. As Schaeffer explained in his Traité des objets musicaux, his method was morphological (see (Chion 2016., p. 178ff)). He developed a set of criteria for mapping and describing sound, which included: mass, harmonic timbre, grain, allure, and dynamism. He was interested, in other words, not only in the extended or sustained sounds that electronics made possible in their independence from acoustic instruments producing vibrations in the air; he also sought to create knots and bundles and unsettling juxtapositions of sound.

One could almost say that Schaeffer pursued transcendental method in the Kantian sense, in his attention to the conditions by which a thing—incarnation, Logos, sound object—comes into being. Critic Paul Hegarty confessed his puzzlement over Schaeffer’s use of the term “sonorous eye” (rather than the more obvious ear) (Hegarty 2009, p. 34). Consider, however, the significance of ocular imagery—from the “third eye” to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “naked eyeball”—in traditions seeking to understand the mysteries swirling beyond the body. Schaeffer’s music sits in the thick of this inscrutability, drawing on known religious traditions and other sources to enact transformations that some readers might describe in religious terms but that the composer himself usually avoided. That this art holds together these tensions reveals something about the relation between sound, form, intentionality, and an increasingly fluid “religion.”

This tracks with broader religious realignments at work during this time period, where increasing numbers of younger practitioners in Europe and North America sought new religious experiences outside of settled institutions. Many explored Neopaganism or the revived esoteric traditions that compelled Schaeffer (see (Ellwood 1994)). As a result of these and other trends, we encounter uncertainty as concerning “the relationship between an experience and its account”; the modes of concentration and sometimes surprise at work in Schaeffer’s pieces can be linked to the religious insofar as these sounds prompt listeners to wonder just what religion actually is (Bender 2010, p. 58).

4. Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening

These are practices and experiences often linked to New Age music, whose eclecticism is as marked as the religious subculture with which it shares a name. Whether George Winston’s piano music, wind sounds for chakra meditations, or varieties of ambient sound, New Age music is broadly associated with practices of personal transformation through alignment with a “holistic universe” or a cosmos in harmonic balance. Many of the most popular New Age ideas, however, can be traced back to the thriving metaphysical culture of nineteenth-century America. Conceptualists like Ralph Waldo Trine, Andrew Jackson Davis, or Helena Petrovna Blavatsky sought to “develop technologies that would allow contact between the dead and the living, or would prove the power of mental healing and mind over matter (Bender 2010, p. 101).”

Before she began to explore such ideas, Texan Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was, like many in her generation, fascinated with the possibilities of tape music and electronics. By the time she undertook a residency at Mills College’s electronics studio, Oliveros had concluded that electronics would enable her to realize the sounds she heard in nature and in her head. She would in time associate these projects with meditation and ceremonial music. The tape machine, she believed, could tap into “a particular kind of mental state with its own body feelings and mental space. It’s an altered state of consciousness,” a “life force” that she claimed was the source of her compositions (Duckworth 1999, p. 164). While clearly indebted to Cage as well as other early electronic music mavericks like Edgard Varese (1883–1965) and Henri Pousseur (1929–2009), Oliveros was not especially compelled by the experimentalism for its own sake often pursued in European compositional hubs like Cologne or Darmstadt. Instead, she describes herself in her early composing period as “a witch capturing sounds from a nether realm.”14

As Oliveros began to explore new territories like layered drones (which generally grew from her breathing exercises while playing accordion), she began to understand electronics as the ideal medium for promoting awareness of one’s situatedness in time and space. Beginning in the 1970s, as she and other musicians began to explore what became known as “deep listening,” she revived her childhood exploration of natural settings, fascinated particularly by canyons and caves. She noted, “[t]he musical exploitation of cavernous resonance is ancient, perhaps as ancient as any other form of sonic experiment.”15 She noted further that the purpose of much sacred architecture was “to have sound which has a supernatural presence.”16

While she generally avoided reference to particular sacred beings, Oliveros can be read alongside the growing interest—from the 1960s forward—in esoteric traditions and meditational practices common to New Age communities and practitioners. Specifically, through her electronic compositions primarily, Oliveros’ nature/drone mysticism aligns with New Age interests in tuning the body as well as with the idea that “a body’s vibrations are the central clue to locating a person in physical or astral geography (Bender 2010, p. 165).” She sought to use electronics to produce an attentiveness suitable for meditative practices that heightened the impact of the sound. As we have seen with Cage and Schaeffer, the refinement of such sonic instruments and methods expands the possibilities of what religious experience might be. She explained to William Duckworth that this pursuit “provides different entryways, a different focus” for understanding energies and connections between different aspects of existence (Duckworth 1999, p. 174). Deep listening is precisely the exploration of these interconnections. Whether in improvised performance or composition, this mode of engagement with sound entails “releasing conscious control to my nonverbal body” so that audiences and performers might understand the “invisible and inaudible causes” of a particular time and place (Oliveros 2016, pp. 85, 89).

Oliveros understood the practical effect of doing things that acoustic instruments could not always do. A delay pedal, for example, could simulate particularly vast echoes or reverberations even inside a studio. Yet they also had conceptual implications that were at the heart of Oliveros’ music. She understood a delay device as “a time machine”: “when I play something in the present, then it’s delayed and comes back in the future. But when it comes back in the future, I’m dealing with the past, and also playing again in the present, anticipating the future. So that’s expanding time (Rodgers 2010, p. 29).”

In her last two decades, Oliveros’ use of electronics shifted to incorporate interactive possibilities. She became fascinated by the possibility of achieving a “sonosphere” encompassing the full range of energies: acoustic, electromagnetic, quantum, emotional, and more (Kahn 2013, p. 194). This led to her exploration of instant communities forming in cyberspace and distance ensembles across multiple sites (Kelly 2013, p. 161). These projects were linked to her investigation of esoteric traditions and string theory, culminating in her interest in the idea of circuits connecting celestial bodies: she was convinced, for example, of a “deep relationship between Chi Kung and Quantum Field Theory (Kahn 2013, p. 195).” Yet as Douglas Kahn writes, we might also think Oliveros alongside Helena P. Blavatsky’s pan-traditional focus on accessing other realms through occult means. Blavatsky noted, in ways Oliveros would surely have appreciated, that in many traditions it was common to think of phenomena like wind or the sound of rivers as “the keynote of nature (Kahn 2013, p. 176).” But, writing just a few years before her death, Oliveros also referred approvingly to French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of a noosphere when she described “collective musical intelligence as an energy field.”17 Whether performing in nature, producing new sounds on a machine, or simply listening to the creative energy in the air, deep listeners would flip the switches as “the harbingers of world community and planetary consciousness.”18

5. Eliane Radigue and Sonic Impermanence

One of the most significant developments during this period of artistic and religious ferment was the broad popularization of Buddhism among Europeans and North Americans. This would reconfigure how many practitioners sought to express and hear their religions. Among them is French composer Eliane Radigue (1932–2026), who began her explorations of tape music as an apprentice to Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1927–2017), assisting the latter with his 1968 Apocalypse de Jean.19 During the 1960s she began to experiment with long-form compositions employing pure electronic feedback, marked by minimal volume and extremely slow pacing. Radigue employed these means so as to induce new modes of concentration.20 Pieces like “Vice Versa” and “Feedback Works” brought her enough attention to travel to New York. There she was introduced to synthesizers and began composing on the Buchla, Moog, and eventually the ARP 2500.

As her pieces became increasingly distinctive—from CHRY-PTUS to Adnos I—Radigue’s life took a new direction. Having been invited to the Bay Area to perform some of these works, in 1974 she encountered among her audience some visiting French students who encouraged Radigue to visit a Tibetan Buddhist Center when next she returned to Paris. When Radigue left New York to return to France, she took the advice and became intrigued with the Karma Kagyu school taught at this center. One year later, she met Pawo Rinpoche, who shortly became her teacher, and she immersed herself in Buddhism for three years before resuming composition, which were shaped by her interest in Buddhism’s teachings on emptiness and impermanence.21

She worked on Adnos II with the idea of completely breaking down any distinction between self and other. Even on a superficial level this certainly reflects her understanding of basic Buddhist teachings on codependent origination and avoiding attachment. But what made Radigue’s new compositional phase stand out was her ability to incorporate her early work on electronics, microscopic sound, and glacial pacing into a larger project aimed at transformative states of the sort she regularly explored in her own meditative practice. Her goal was to create as much uncertainty in the listener as possible, as a way of loosening conceptual impediments to insight. In the immense, hour-long slabs of sound she created, she was picking up on a component known to be particular to ritual music, which “require[es] a temporal dimension in which to unfold (Bellah 2011, p. 33).” While this is superficially of all music, what Radigue drew from her Buddhist practice was the hope that her use of long duration and microscopic change might open listeners’ consciousness to the extent that it would entail reduction of the ego. She regularly compared such transformations to natural phenomena: in the essay Le temps n’as pas d’importance, “she likens her music to a plant. ‘We never see a plant move, but it is growing continually’.”22

Fellow composer Rhys Chatham (1952–present) notes that the title Adnos is significant in this regard:

“ ‘Ad’ means ‘going towards’ and ‘nos’ is evocative of the Latin subject pronoun ‘we,’ or ‘noos’ in Greek, which according to Radigue can be rendered ‘the Universal that everything comes from.’ The feeling evoked by the two words combined is to globally ‘go towards unity,’ or perhaps: ‘going towards the One’.”23

Long tones at the outer edge of audibility contrasted with deep thrums more felt than heard; these are the constitutive elements of the pieces Radigue composed over the next decades, each more fully invested in her Buddhist practice than the last. Of her important piece “Psi 847,” Radigue wrote that she aspired over the course of its eighty minutes to achieve “[s]low stretching … Time suspended within the time unit … Distances between proximity and familiarity.”24 More deeply invested in the Kagyu tradition founded by Milarepa, Radigue alternated between meditation and the painstaking process of recording and assembling layer after layer of sound, each to be subsumed into the next.

She assembled Jetsun Mila and Songs of Milarepa, incorporating Buddhist text recitation in some instances, which has a striking effect when set against the insistent grind of electronic tones, very nearly at sinewave pitches. Kyema, Intermediate States is directly inspired by the Bardo Thödol, whose “six intermediate states”—birth, dream, contemplation/meditation, death, clear light, and becoming—are believed to represent the fullest spectrum of experiencing existence. Radigue is explicitly picking up on the Bardo’s promise, in the translation of its very title, of “liberation through hearing during intermediate states.” The piece intends to imagine what the Bardo suggests are the moments immediately preceding physical death, when “certain sounds are heard by the individual that are said to be physical resultants of the disintegrating process known as death. These sounds … resemble humming, crackling, and rolling noises.”25 This is precisely the template for Radigue’s composition, which requires what she once called the “electronic Fairy” to produce such “[p]ulsations, breaths, beatings …”26

After her son was killed in a car crash, Radigue began working on two pieces meant to accompany Kyema in what would become her Trilogie de la Mort. Kailasha is named for the axis mundi of Tibetan Buddhism, the mountain which is thought to be the point of entry to Shambala and is “also considered a great natural mandala.”27 Radigue considered the composition akin to a symbolic pilgrimage. Following it, she traveled to Nepal for her mentor Rinpoche’s cremation, and there became wholly convinced of “the transcendental aspect of death.”28 This proved her inspiration for Koume, which she described as a “[w]ork of ashes. Ashes of illusion becoming light.” (see note 28 above). In this body of work devoted to concentration on impermanence, the use of such tactile means as electronic machines reflects how music, in Susanne K. Langer’s reckoning, can “make things conceivable” and produce insight into “how feelings go.”29 Yet while the connections between Buddhist thought and Radigue’s work are clear, other electronic composers reveal one of the most durable observations in the study of religion: that religion is fundamentally protean and often unpredictable.

6. Alvin Lucier’s “Sanctifying Atmosphere”

Alvin Lucier (1931–2021) was long famous for taking the Cagean insistence on experimentation and discovery to the outer limits of what might actually constitute “music.” He had an inscrutable countenance, often pictured as the composer was wired into various machines or as he prepared one of his complicated environments for listeners, performers, and experiencers. Although his music is very different from Oliveros’, Lucier described his music as trying to induce curiosity and wonder, comparing the effect to that of children who hold their ears up to conch shells on the beach (which is common practice among Tibetan monks, and is linked to the reverence and use of natural objects found widely in shamanic traditions) (Lucier and Simon 1980, p. 14). Although, like Radigue, some of Lucier’s music has recently been performed on acoustic instruments (which brings considerable challenges), his basic materials were the wavelength, the frequency, the sine-wave, and the brain itself.

Lucier’s compositional attitude itself can be reasonably described as an almost religious wonderment at technology itself, combined with veneration of the processes to which particular techniques are geared, particularly when these techniques involve the heightened perception and scrutiny of performers or audience members. This is perhaps most evident in considering his famous “Music for Solo Performer,” which connects the performer’s actual body to various resonating devices and produces sound via the “amplified alpha waves” of the performer, Lucier himself (Miller-Keller et al. 2011, p. 23). While he was less openly invested in exploring esoteric traditions than Schaeffer, there are obvious hermetic overtones in Lucier’s consistent interest in using technologies to reveal the hidden. This latter notion was apparently inspired by Lucier’s boyhood observation of a Trappist monk in contemplative prayer: “I thought if there’s any such thing as pure thought, this man was doing it … With contemplation one focuses the mind on some thing or idea; with meditation one is supposed to empty the mind. (Miller-Keller et al. 2011, pp. 26–27)”

The piece itself is one that Lucier often acknowledged as meditative, but in a very particular sense. It requires the abandonment of control and the complete emptying of one’s consciousness in the moment, else the alpha waves will be blocked and the piece fail. This tactical or technical focus might seem to resist classification as religious. Yet as Kahn notes, it would be over-simplifying to interpret this piece as consisting merely of very difficult logistics. He refers, instead, to Lucier’s “therapeutic hope” that art can be made from a human organism which “merely changing the states of visual attention, can active a large configuration of communication equipment with what appears to be power from a spiritual realm (Kahn 2013, p. 107).” The body as conduit for sacred sound, the gaze as receptor.30

To get fuller realization of such states, Lucier plumbed multiple religious and speculative traditions, producing unexpected combinations of sound and ideas. Queen of the South is named for an alchemical term, and is rooted in the ideas of German physicist Ernst Chladni, who mapped acoustics and speculated about the healing properties of sound. Discussing the composition “Quasimodo,” Lucier said, “I’ve always been drawn to music that tells you about the way things are or can be … that directness of purpose could be a metaphor for one’s life (Lucier and Simon 1980, p. 62).” Taking this into consideration, it is interesting that, although he described many of his pieces as communicational in nature, Lucier sought to avoid sounds that were too human or emotional. He was far less concerned with form and beauty than with process, movement, and traveling sounds. “Vespers,” for example, was so titled both to signal the “sanctifying atmosphere of the Catholic religion and to pay homage to the common bat of North America of the family Vespertilonidae (Toop 1995, p. 246).” The idea that amplifying room tones or brain waves is linked to religions is, admittedly, not an intuitive one. But the bat’s echolocation is suggestive, insofar as Lucier found something “spiritual” in “the information that one should be aware of one’s surroundings and that one can receive omens, information from sound or visual events in one’s surroundings. (Lucier and Simon 1980, p. 137)”. The power of manifesting sound so as to intensify people’s relationship to their space is, Lucier explained more clearly, like creating the Heavenly Host, or like “saints having visions” of the divine wavelengths and frequencies most of us tune out (Lucier and Simon 1980, p. 141).

Lucier’s work, then, distills some important themes in avant-garde music, employing electronics to problematize the relation between composer and audience, and to demonstrate how music can transform consciousness in the non-metaphorical sense. In its resistance to convention, it is suggestive to think of his music as evidence for Ann Taves’ writings about the anomalous experiences or “special things” often classified as religions (Taves 2009). Taves’ work is known broadly for its ability to help scholars understand the cognitive attributions religious people assign to their experiences. Yet significant in Lucier’s work is a broader dissolution of the unconscious “ascriptions” that might impede interpreting new sensory experiences as religious.

7. William Basinski and Electronic Elegies

Similar conceptions haunt the work of sound artist William Basinski (1958–present), who toiled in obscurity for decades until, immediately following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, his Disintegration Loops received considerable attention. The four-part piece is comprised of long melodies harvested from a cache of old tape recordings Basinski had stumbled upon the year before. When he began to digitize the old analogue tapes, they were in such poor condition that they began coming apart as he played them in the process of conversion. Rather than try to halt the process, Basinski recorded them as they played continually, beginning to sense in the repeating patterns long rhythmic and melodic arcs that he eventually understood as an “elegy.”31 This established Basinski’s method of using electronic sound as a medium for evocation and the capacity to be affected religiously outside of congregation or context.

What does it mean to arrive at such a judgment about morphing, decaying sound? Part of it may be explained simply by attending to the composer’s own intentions. A lapsed Catholic, Basinski does not shy away from the religious overtones of his expansive music, whether it is in the elegiac or the minimalist mode. Indeed, he claims that much of his music remains directly inspired by the “really mystical, wonderful, magical” sounds of his childhood church in Houston32. Similarly, he enjoys having his pieces performed in churches, which he believes are themselves “musical instruments … incredibly sophisticated machines (see note 32 above).” While Basinski rejects “what passes for Christianity in my country,” he professes, “I love Christ” and likens performances of his work to a mass, even confessing that he prays during performances (see note 32 above).

Basinski’s work, however, more importantly gives rise to and provokes thinking about religious affect. Inasmuch as his music is more overtly melodic and emotional than the other composers discussed herein, it is clear that Basinski intends a different kind of listening experience than, say, Lucier. In using technologies to create melodic and sonic density rather than minimalist severity, Basinski aims towards a different series of effects on the listener, who might then experience what affect theorists describe as “flares” or “blooms” (see Brennan 2004). Affective intensities such as these might delineate the horizon that they simultaneously overflow, revealing perhaps what listeners manifestly lack when not in the presence of this sound.

Affect theory does many things, but in terms of thinking about sonic experiences it gives us a way—perhaps building on Deleuze and Guattari most significantly—of moving beyond the analysis of religious ascription alone in order to generate a language for evoking the passions: sensuous, aesthetic, religious. With this in mind, it is perhaps easier to make sense of some of Basinski’s more recent compositional directions, which similarly distill themes of longing and wonder. In 2019 he released the ambitious On Time Out of Time, in which he composes for and utilizes sound from two black holes colliding with each other 1.3 billion years ago, whose gravitational waves were recorded at an MIT observatory in 2015. The piece is Pythagorean in its ambitions at transcribing the cosmos itself, and Basinski debuted it at an “ambient church” performance in New York.33 His recent Lamentations is, because it is distinct in Basinski’s canon for its use of text, an even clearer window into how he envisions the affective and social implications of his long, laminal drones. The piece takes in references to Paradise Lost, environmental action (“Silent Spring”), and the Hebrew Bible, including Psalms and Judges as well as Lamentations, whose excerpt—“How deserted lies the city … she remembers all the treasures that were hers in the days of old”—is intended to spur reflection and contemplation of the conditions humanity faces in an ever more precarious future (about which Basinski himself says in one of the piece’s sub-titles, “Please, This Shit Has Got To Stop”). The piece’s concluding sections, however, are intended to promote grasping after different realities, as indicated by titles like “Transfiguration” and by the presence of choral vocals, which one reviewer likened to “an intimation of the divine.”34 Cycling through all of Basinski’s music is the centrality of drone music, and the perceptual states it induces, holding together what is disappearing and what is appearing, continually oscillating. Basinski even describes this as a “redemptive quality” of the medium he works in: “the entire life and death of each of these unique melodies was recorded to another medium for eternity.”35

If affect is, as Brian Massumi writes, “trans-situational” and is “the invisible glue that holds the world together,” does the experience of Basinski’s music aid in or undermine “stickiness” (Massumi 2002, p. 217)? If, as Anna Gibbs writes, affect is “an asubjective force in a perspective from which the human appears as an envelope of possibilities,” what modes of “religion” are emotionally activated by the presence of aesthetic attunement to these possibilities, which seem to straddle the boundary separating real from evanescent, religious from secular (Gibbs 2010, p. 187)? The urgency of a musical moment, heightened by the strange and new textures made possible through electricity, has the peculiar effect of—as Gibbs writes, citing Proust—“giving rise to what is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract (Gibbs 2010, p. 201).’” In Basinski’s music, the long ago sounds of stars being born or the timbres of a liturgy are equally emergent and remote.

8. Religion as Signal and Noise

Equally emergent and remote is, I submit, one way of describing the modes of religion described herein. The transformations wrought by electricity have not only been persistently yoked to religious terminology and aspirations, they also—particularly in the works of these religiously curious composers who manipulate this medium—reveal much about the vexations of religion itself. Across this musical spectrum we see how an engagement with, or creation of, electronic sound generators opens into questions about perception, affect, materiality, and experience that are central to the study of religion. These are by no means the only musical explorers whose innovations are tied to the manipulation of electronics. Yet unlike the keyboard innovations of Sun Ra or the reinvention of guitar performance by Jimi Hendrix, these composers focus less on expression or release than on meditation or ego reduction. They seek broadly to upgrade sonic objects in order to upgrade the consciousness of listeners, resulting in states broadly understood as hypnagogic. Their works do not constitute a mode of religious practice so much as exempla of how religion is mediated through sonic technology.

These issues clearly intersect with expressions of sonic religion across time and place, from the generative cosmological sound in Hindu traditions to Emmanuel Swedenborg’s rhapsodies about the sound of angels. The composers discussed above have sought to attune themselves to varied expressions of sonic sacred energy, and to the possibility of capturing music’s impermanence, by turning to electrical objects, techniques, and machines. If we trace the history of sound-making objects through the electronic age, beginning with the early Victrola and the theremin, we find ourselves in an era when everyday objects can be amplified, instruments deconstructed and prepared to produce new sound, and rapid developments in signal-processing and acousmatic design make possible a wide range of perceptual experiences (see Ashline 2003).

Foremost among those I have written about herein are contemplative or hypnagogic states of the sort famously described by Gilbert Rouget (Rouget 1985). Though the composers described do not engage explicitly with the category possession, they are drawn to the idea of suspending the ego, to evoking perceptions that deepen mystery, and to a greater integration between sound, body, and environment. The specific properties of electricity—static, feedback, vibration—are put into the service of an experiential depth that cuts across values, meanings, processes, times and places, even as they draw from religious traditions both familiar and obscure. The use of devices and techniques for inducing religious experience is a durable theme in the study of religions. These composers discover in machines the arcana of new modes of embodiment, which resonate suggestively with the preoccupations of religious practitioners and those who study them. By exploring electronic composition from the perspective of sonically attuned religious studies, and focusing more particularly on affect and material religion among other concerns, we encounter still further expressions of religion’s abundance and unknowability alike. From the alpha waves of Alvin Lucier to William Basinski’s or Eliane Radigue’s meditations on death and decay, religion remains as elemental and protean as the electricity these composers use to evoke it.