Trying to get an accurate portrait of the music of French drone composer Eliane Radigue via samples on the Internet is pointless. It's like looking at a splinter to reckon a table. Her compositions are usually longer than 45 minutes and the effect of her music-- or, the effect it's had on me-- is cumulative and requires patience. If I want slogans or instant, searing gratification, I am more than happy to turn on "Born to Run", and sometimes do. If I want a warm, private rumble, I turn on Eliane Radigue and turn off my phone.

Not only is her music impossible to sample, it's hard to grade-- something that Important Records' John Brien underscored in an email to me recently by saying, "Good luck w/ that." Important-- a label Brien started in 2001 out of his apartment in Newburyport, Mass., a coastal city 45 minutes north of Boston-- has played midwife to small-batch underground stuff ranging from Om live records to a 13xCD Merzbow set packaged in a handmade bamboo box. (The label's motto: "Because we love music even more than you.") By comparison then, their issuing of Triptych (1978) and Vice Versa, etc. (1970), which have never been on CD, is one of their least esoteric, plainly noble gestures-- they're just getting the music out there where it didn't exist before.

Both pieces came at pivot points in Radigue's career. Vice Versa is a tape-based drone recorded in 1970, a year before Radigue started working with the ARP 2500, a synthesizer that looks like a telephone switchboard with a keyboard and weighs about 60 pounds. For decades after, she used it exclusively. 1978's Triptych was Radigue's first full composition after dropping out of music to dedicate herself to Tibetan Buddhism in 1974. (Though she didn't leave Buddhism behind-- her works through the 70s, 80s, and 90s are not only suffused with a sense of contemplativeness and unrepentant nowness, but they're literally based on events and stories from Buddhist literature.)

Vice Versa is made from tape feedback, divided into four tracks played at different speeds, the shortest lasting 2:44 and the longest lasting 13:43. The set's second disc is the same tracks, backwards. Radigue's intention was to let a listener mix and match (which is unusual given that digital technology makes this infinitely easier than it would've been 40 years ago, though this also explains why VV's first and only run was limited to 10 copies).

Unlike Triptych-- or most of what she wrote during the ARP years-- there's not a lot of rise and fall to the composition. It's sensuous music; it's actually about sound. Did I play the backwards tracks against the frontwards ones? Yes, and to great satisfaction. My speakers quivered, my mind released. But while the concept behind the music is elegant, it's also the music's driving force, and it ultimately makes the piece feel antiseptic compared to what came later. [For some good, honest writing on the dilemma of music designed to be listened to in specific, sometimes inconvenient ways, read Pitchfork managing editor Mark Richardson's recent Resonant Frequency column.]

Triptych, conversely, is wonderful. Radigue's music doesn't just have depth, it has narrative: it rises and falls; it dilates and contracts, utilizing pure sound rather than harmony for its development. Watching Radigue work in the studio (there's documentary footage of this), it's easier to understand how her music sounds as hand-hewn as it does: She's actually sitting there, sliding sliders, patching cables, turning dials. It's guided by human hands and feels that way-- enveloping, almost sweet. Her stopwatch, which she uses to measure the duration of tones in a piece, is nicknamed "nounours"-- "teddy bear."

Triptych works over long periods of time in weirdly magical ways-- 40 seconds of the piece might sound exactly the same, but skip ahead five minutes and it will sound completely different. It's subtle, but it keeps a dynamic. This is the best defense it has against listeners who might just want to say that it bores them because "nothing happens"-- it's right there; things are happening constantly, they're just almost imperceptible.

Whether or not you want this experience in your life-- of deep listening to quiet music that does more to facilitate thought and imagination than guide it-- is up to you. Like rock climbing or marriage or anything else, all avocational arguments for it are slightly moral. I don't privilege Radigue's music over other music, but I do privilege it over other music of its kind. In a recent documentary by Austria's Institute for Media Archeology, Radigue said, "In the beginning, there was a certain music that I wished to make. It was this particular music and no other." It's not an overstatement: Hers is a particular music, but there's nothing like it.