Œuvres Électroniques

2024 Repress. Incredible 14xCD lavish box set, a 16+ hour compendium of the electronic music key works from one of the most important electronic composers of the 20th century complete with a 106 page book. Born between wars, Eliane Radigue’s musical journey began in the Paris studios of musique concrète OGs Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry during the 1950s and 60s, experimenting with magnetic tapes, honing her craft in sound construction. But it wasn’t until the 1970s when Eliane moved to New York City — because as she said, “There were no synthesizers in Paris”— that many of her recorded works and beloved pieces were formulated. During this period, Eliane adopted the ARP 2500modular synthesizer, a system that endured in her compositions through the 1990s despite radical technological improvements in electronic music. With this equipment, Radigue developed an unfolding of sound into a stasis that resembles the minimalists of her era but was nonetheless complex in its timbrel dynamics.
Radigue’s music doesn’t just have depth, it has narrative: it rises and falls; it dilates and contracts, utilizing pure sound rather than harmony for its development. Speaking of her music in general, Radigue said, “I am working with the perception of time.” This effect is displayed prominently in these works , whose extreme duration coupled with its tepid continuity slow time into molasses and reorients temporal reality.