Éliane Radigue, an electronic and musique concrete composer who studied electroacoustic techniques in Paris under the guidance of Schaeffer and Henry, is perhaps most notably known for her lengthy relationship with the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer and association with Mimi Johnsons Lovely Music Ltd label. Around 1970 she began to experiment with synthesizer-based music at New York University in a studio space which she shared with Laurie Spiegel (of recently reissued ‘The Expanding Universe’ fame). The synthesizer the pair used was a Buchla synth installed by Morton Subotnick (co-founder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center). Shortly after her 1974 performance of ‘Adnos’ at Mills College, SF, Radigue began to adopt practices and elements of Tibetan…
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…Buddhism, taking a 3 year break from musical pursuits in order to devote herself to the religion. In 1979 she completed Adnos II and in 1980 Adnos III. However, it is her three hour long epic ‘Trilogie de la Mort’, which is heavily influenced by the idea of the six states of consciousness and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, that is perhaps her most widely recognised and most accomplished work.
Italian archival label Alga Marghen, who specialise in ‘experimental historical obscurites, obscure outsiders, and twentieth-century composition’, have released a double pack gatefold LP of Radigues Opus 17. Originally completed in 1970 and concluding her ‘feedback works’ series, ‘Opus 17’ is an exploration into the interesting world of feedback drones and classical decomposition. Utilising a technique extremely similar to Alvin Luciers masterpiece ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’, Radigue set about feeding fragments of Chopin and Wagner pieces via speaker systems into a large room with contact microphones recording the audio, tape manipulation was then used to loop and layer these captured sounds – culminating in a unique and engaging listening experience (and also pre-dating ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’ by a full decade)