Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue: Blank Forms 10

By Eliane Radigue

"The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms offers a deep dive into the profoundly complex and elusive work of “Parisian electronic composer” Éliane Radigue, whose calmly radical approach to music has long defied interpretation. This collection brings together key texts, newly translated primary documents, in-depth interviews, and commissioned essays to delve into Radigue's “unreal, impalpable music,” and “idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification and the very experience of listenership.” An abundance of ephemera materials complement this essential and substantive, very handsome yet affordable publication."
–Herbert Pföstl

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. Detailed conversations provide crucial windows into her working methods at different points in her career. Sketches for unrealized work, contemporary reviews, programs and ephemera are collected together for the first time. The anthology concludes with a roundtable discussion working out the knotty paradoxes of Radigue’s continued "ethos of resistance."

2025; paperback; 6" x 7.9"; 407 pages; ISBN: 9781953691224.