Irradiation

Patricia Enigl, aka Irradiation, is an electronic artist, DJ and club host as well as the co-initiator and manager of the Viennese label TEMP~, founded in 2003. With it, she has published four EPs; in 2014, two EPs and an album will be launched. Irradiation has been active in music since 1989.

In 1999, as a DJ and electronic artist, she was one of the first members of the »Soundpark« series on Radio FM4, where she came into contact with later members of the TEMP~ crew. In 2002, a cooperation for an audio-visual live set at the »Lange Nacht der Musik« was the starting point of a long collaboration with visual artist Mingo. In summer 2003, in reaction to the need to document and showcase the flourishing Austrian electronic music scene in an international context, the TEMP~ Electronic Music Festival was organised in Greifenstein near Vienna.

In the same year, this resulted in the foundation of the TEMP~ label. TEMP~ quickly became an acclaimed networking platform for local and international artists, on which for example 550 Rondy, Digilog, Cosmanova, Evirgen, Kelvin Raah or Marcus Füreder released their work. Until 2009, the TEMP~ Festival was organised annually, and Irradiation’s curating gave momentum to Austrian music, audio-visuals and arts.

The 2007 festival compilation is a rich 6-disk CD review of 40 bands and projects, including amongst others Wang Inc., Ravissa, Al-Haca or Karin Steinbinder. At the same time and over the following years, Irradiation hosted the regular club nights TEMP~eriert in locations like the rhiz. Irradiation’s 2004 EP debut was »A Place for Crazy People«, followed by »Wunschtraum Nr. 1« two years later.

Later collaborations included singer Didi Bruckmayr , jazz trombonist Werner Puntigam and rapper Mieze Medusa, whose number »Umnebelt« was featured on the 2007 FM4 »Soundselection« CD series. Two years later, Irradiation toured Japan with Female Pressure artists. After internal label reorganisation, two Irradiation EPs were published in 2011: »Catharsis« with additional remixes by Bruno Pronsato and Heinz Seidenbusch, and »Phytoplankton «, which was a collaboration project with Female Pressure’s Electric Indigo including remixes by Dasha Rush, Rossella and Jennifer Cardini.

It was awarded top rankings in several DJ charts. In 2012, these were followed by the improvisation project Pasajera Obscura with Viennese artist Christina Nemec . And finally, in 2014, Irradiation is particularly active: The EP »Black Body Radiation« will be published in June, followed by the EP »Diffraction« and the 14-track concept album »Quantum Oscillations« in autumn.

Irradiation’s artistic output is best described as a permanent exploration of the space between repetitive and abstract electronic music. From the start, the Irradiation set-up was conceived as an audio-visual interlacing, with artists Stefan Kushima, Jade, c++ or mes providing the visuals. Her pieces, awarded an annual SKE stipend in 2008 and funding by the Austrian Music Fund, have increasingly moved towards being experimental sound studies over the last years, yet without losing the dance floor from sight.

She was entrusted with the commissioned composition »Patterns of Symmetry Breaking« by the Austrian Department of Foreign Affairs in 2012, which was an audio-visual live set staged at the ten year anniversary of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York as well as at the Wienmodern Festival in the track »club meets avant-garde«. Irradiation’s new releases constitute a cartography of links between electronic music and quantum theory which join the loose ends between electronic dance music and acousmatic improvisation.