The Saltern label has announced the May 5 release of a new live recording of Éliane Radigue’s extraordinary solo cello work Naldjorlak, featuring Charles Curtis. The performance is from a Los Angeles show in 2020.

The double-CD package also features Curtis’ 2006 performance in Paris.

“Even as it expands conceptions of what sound is, and thus what music can be, to understand Naldjorlak only as music would be to limit its scope,” writes Gascia Ouzounian in the album’s notes. She is an associate professor of music at the University of Oxford, and fellow and tutor in music at Lady Margaret Hall. “It is music, but it is also physics and philosophy. Naldjorlak is a detailed investigation of the physical properties of resonating bodies and dynamic systems; it is a meditation on the condition of instability; it is a metaphysics of chaos and uncertainty.”

Radigue composed Naldjorlak in 2005, in collaboration with Curtis. It’s best known for featuring a cello tuned to the wolf tone, an overtone produced when both the cello and strings vibrate simultaneously. Both performances clock in at just under an hour.