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Artist
Eliane Radigue
12+ albums
droneminimalismAvant-Gardeexperimentalambient
about
Eliane Radigue (1932-2026) was a French electronic music composer whose work, since the early 1970s, has 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 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 concrète Pierre Schaeffer. She met him shortly thereafter and, in the early 50s, she became his student. Subsequently, during periodic visits to Paris she worked at the Studio d'Essai. Later, 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 at which time she created some of the sounds that appeared in his work. As her work gained maturity, Schaeffer and Henry considered her use of microphone feedback with long tape loops as treachery to their own ideals. 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 contemporary minimalism composers of New York than to her previous influences, the French musique concrète composers. After presenting the first of her Adnos in 1974 at Mills College at the invi
