ep11

6 October 2025

François J. Bonnet / Éliane Radigue
Performed by the ONCEIM orchestra
(Concert in collaboration with Festival d'Automne, Le Muse en Circuit and ONCEIM)

Tickets

Doors 20:00, concert 20:30
1h40 with intermission

Ticket prices 8€ to 25€

François J. Bonnet’s new commissioned piece Orbes reaches out to a celestial vault where, due to the force of gravity, the stars attract each other. "Make waves for me," was what Éliane Radigue asked each of the musicians of Occam Océan I to do. This free-flowing work which relies upon a subtle mastery of each sound exerts deep fascination on behalf of its listeners.

In Paradise Lost, the poet John Milton speaks of "dazzling orbs", in an allusion to the plurality of different worlds. Satan frees himself from Hell, chaos, and the night in order to corrupt the new-born humanity, and makes his way through its abstract universe. These images provided the inspiration for this piece by François J. Bonnet. Exploring the possibilities of the instruments themselves, he sets forth sequences and uses the different sound energies in order to build up a composition in which every orb is the horizon of another, in multiple trajectories.

Occam Océan I leads us into the dizzying vibrations in which we are bathed, those of the infinitely small kind and those between the Sun and the Earth, if not beyond, towards other galaxies. The ocean provides us with an image, on a more human scale, of the variety of their lengths, between tide and wavelet, lapping at the water’s edge and foam. The title of the work also refers to "Ockham's razor", taken from a fourteenth-century philosopher. It centres upon a principle of simplicity, economy and parsimony, enriching our knowledge of sound and allowing the life-force that it carries within it to simply happen.