Trilogie de la Mort is a three-part cycle by the French composer Éliane Radigue, made on an analogue ARP synthesiser and issued complete as a three-CD set by XI, the label of Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia, in 1998. Each part runs close to an hour. Kyema, first released on its own by XI in 1991, follows the six intermediate states of being described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead; Kailasha is shaped as an imagined pilgrimage around Mount Kailash in the Himalayas; Koumé turns towards the transcendence of death.
The music unfolds through barely perceptible changes in tones that seem to hang motionless, so that the act of attention, rather than any event, becomes the subject. In place of movement and contrast, stillness itself becomes the method, and small shifts in the beating of close tones carry the drama. The Wire’s critics placed the set among their records of the year in modern composition for 1998.