Eliane Radigue

Biography

From her childhood in Paris, Éliane Radigue will preserve the memory of a secret introduction to music by an understanding piano teacher. Then the harp, singing and composition are added to the piano. But it was only through contact with Concrete Music with Pierre Schaeffer and later with Pierre Henry that Éliane Radigue found her true path.

In more than 50 years there are three different periods, each of which will always mark a break, but each in its own way stands for an inspired exploration of thresholds, of spaces that expand in intervals, and for a dialogue between listening experience and inner experience, between personal history and sensual memory.

The first period (1968-1971) was that of the work on feedbacks and reinjections, an embryonic phase already characterized by extreme precision and work on thresholds and threatened balances.

The second period, spanning thirty years (1971-2001), is characterized by a fruitful production of electronic compositions that inextricably combine her music with the unique beats of her ARP 2500 synthesizer. This period is also marked by the development of long forms with subtle variations that disappear and resound between the history carried by the music and the time necessary for its unfolding.

The third and still ongoing period is that of her mainly acoustic works, which are produced in close collaboration with like-minded musicians from all over the world, giving an additional dimension of relationship to music created up to then alone.

In the course of her life, Éliane Radigue has produced a researching, demanding and inspiring work that today influences a whole new generation of musicians.