Éliane Radigue

Éliane Radigue is one of the pioneers of electronic music, but for the last ten years she has written purely acoustic works. Tectonics Glasgow is thrilled to present some of her new works.
Born in Paris in the 1930s, she studied musique concrète with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and began to make her own tape works using feedback. In the 1970s as a composer in New York she discovered synthesisers eventually finding, in her own words, “a tiny little field of sound that interested me – and I just dug under its skin.”
She continued to create new works, composing for the ARP 2500 modular synth until 2004 when she was asked by bass player Kasper T Toeplitz to write an instrumental piece. She was so taken by the results that she now composes purely for acoustic instruments. In an interview in 2012 she said: “There’s the same difference between acoustic and recording as there is between analogue and digital.
There’s always something missing with digital, even if it issomehow cleaner and clearer. With acoustic instruments, let’s say a bell, when the first gong stops there’s a lot of different sub-harmonics that happen to make the music. Or, if you’ve just got the attack of the bell at the beginning you have a beautiful music just floating like that. This is a natural sound, nobody has tampered with it, it is just intonation
all by itself.”
Many of the performances at the festival will be from her OCCAM OCEAN series which began in 2011, in which “each musician is guided by his or her personal ‘image’. This provides the essential, letting descriptive words and evocations establish a system of communication as the piece is being elaborated, and through this intuitive-instinctive process, we are guided to the very essence of music. There will be as many solos as there are volunteers willing to enter into this shared experience. They become the ‘sources’.”