Eliane Radigue | Artist

Éliane Radigue is a French minimalist electronic music composer born 1932 in Paris. She creates meditative electronic works based on Tibetan Buddhism using tape and an Arp synthesizer. Radigue initially studied piano and was already composing before hearing a broadcast by the founder of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer. In the '50s she worked at the Studio d'Essai with Schaeffer and fellow electronic composer Pierre Henry, creating microphone feedback and tape loops. Around 1970, she created her first synthesizer-based music in a studio she shared with Laurie Spiegel on a Buchla synthesiser installed by Morton Subotnick at NYU. Until 2000 her work was created on a single synthesizer, the ARP 2500 modular system and tape. From 2001 she focussed almost exclusively on compositions for acoustic instruments. In the late 1980s, after converting to Buddhism, she devoted herself to creating works influenced by the Tibetan Book of the Dead and her meditation practices. Her music often seems static on first hearing. Her most famous piece, the Buddhism-inspired “Trilogie de la Mort,” lasts three hours and seems vast and empty. Yet there is progression in the musical material, with each line inching its way along, however deliberately. In discussing her creative method, Radigue explained; “Time, silence and space are the main factors constituting my music.. Shivering space, like a soft breath, induces the vibrations of the silence slightly, becoming sound. She added that “this natural way of working — slowness — takes a long time, of course,” and that she works “inside of time.” Among her many compositions and recordings, outstanding albums include Jetsun Mila (1987), Kyema Intermediate States (1992), Trilogie de la mort (1998), Adnos I-III (2002), L'île re-sonante (2005) and the comprehensive compilation Œuvres électroniques (2018). It was only when Radigue was in her 60s that she began to receive recognition in France, and it was even later when she earned a living from her music. Now at the age of 90 Éliane Radigue still composes her music from the second-floor apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, where she has lived for over fifty years,

Artist Website: wikipedia/Éliane_Radigue

Featured Albums: Eliane Radigue

Related Artists: The Lappatites, Laurie Spiegel, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros

Collections: Women of Note