Created in 2011 under the impulsion of Frédéric Blondy, pianist, composer and improviser, the ONCEIM – Orchestra of New Musical Creations, Experiments and Improvisations – is a big ensemble of thirty musicians, who all share the traits of being superior instrumentalists and at the same time musicians developing instrumental practices, or rather music, which are to them completely personal: they are interpreters and/or improvisers and/or composers – and oftentimes all three at once. This is what allows them to realize the complexities and subtleties of today’s music – and that of Eliane Radigue is no exception.

Just like Eliane Radigue, the non-music score composer (expression penned by Thibaut de Ruyter), the ONCEIM does not work with music scores, in the classical sense of the word: each of its musicians assume the role of creator more than that of interpreter, and insisting that they participate, through active listening, in the structuration of the piece as a whole; and in listening again to the direction of the orchestra; in exploring diverse modes of creation, displacing the cursor from the individual to the more collective; in experimenting with various processes of musical transfer (oral, in the form of instructions, notes, diagrams and timelines) – The ONCEIM firmly places itself at that articulation between composition and improvisation.

Consequently, like Eliane Radigue, whose art is often considered more visual than musical and compared to the works of Rothko – paintings without emptiness, false monochromes and true internal vibrations by the accumulation of layers – the ONCEIM creates a music of 7 sounds (not notes), it works it over like a plastic surgeon, the possibilities of stratification becoming the dimensions of the orchestra: monumental.

Finally, what ONCEIM invites us to, like Eliane Radigue, is more than a concert. ONCEIM invites us to an experience of sound – to what is an exploration of our own perceptive inner selves.