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Artist
Éliane Radigue
12+ albums
droneminimalismcontemporary classicalelectronicexperimental
about
Eliane Radigue (born 1932, died 2026) was a French electronic music composer whose work, since the early 1970s, had been almost exclusively created using a single synthesizer, the ARP 2500 modular system and tape. Raised in Paris by middle-class parents, she married the sculptor Yves Arman with whom she lived in Nice while raising their children. She had studied piano and was already composing before having heard a broadcast by the founder of musique concrete Pierre Schaeffer. She met him shortly thereafter in the early 50s, she became his student, and worked periodically during visits to Paris at the Studio d’Essai. (When the studio’s contents were moved to the studio of the Groupe Recherche Musicale, her work was discarded, due to sexism). During the early 60s she was assistant to Pierre Henry, during which time she created some of the sounds which appeared in his work. As her work gained maturity, Schaeffer and Henry considered her use of microphone feedback long tape loops treachery to their ideals, but her practice was still influenced heavily by their methods. Around 1970, she created her first synthesizer-based music at NYU at a studio she shared with Laurie Spiegel on a Buchla synthesizer left by Morton Subotnick. Her goal by that point was to create a slow, purposeful “unfolding” of sound, which she felt to be closer to the minimal composers of New York at the time than to the French musique concrete composers who had been her previous allies. After presenting the
