Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue – Edited by Lawrence Kumpf & Charles Curtis

Softback

407 pages

Blank Forms Editions

ISBN: 9781953691224

This volume is an exploration of the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue (born 1932), whose radical approach to feedback, analog synthesis and composition on tape has long evaded straightforward interpretation. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, in-depth interviews and commissioned essays, this compendium probes her idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification and the very experience of listenership.

Chief among these entries is an in-depth overview by cellist Charles Curtis examining the composer’s earliest experiments in feedback techniques and analog synthesis, her eventual turn to works for unamplified instruments and live performers, and her unique aesthetic of time and presence.

Text by Éliane Radigue, Dagmar Schwerk, Daniel Sillman, Anthony Vine.