about this book

The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms explores the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue, whose radical approach to feedback, analog synthesis, and tape composition has long eluded both historical and technical interpretation. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, interviews, and commissioned essays, this compendium investigates Radigue’s idiosyncratic compositional practice—one that both embraces and challenges the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification, and the very act of listening.

Among the entries is an in-depth overview by cellist Charles Curtis, a close collaborator of Radigue’s, examining her earliest experiments with feedback and analog synthesis, her later shift to composing for unamplified instruments and live performers, and her singular aesthetic conceptions of time and presence. A series of detailed conversations with researchers Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, and Bernard Girard offer critical insights into her working methods across different phases of her career.

Religious studies scholar Dagmar Schwerk reflects on Radigue’s profound synthesizer work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) through the lens of Tibetan Buddhist thought and its historical context. Meanwhile, texts by musicians Daniel Silliman and Madison Greenstone each explore, in markedly different ways, the technical and philosophical dimensions of Radigue’s sonic practice.

Sketches for unrealized works, contemporary reviews, concert programs, and other ephemera tracing the performance history of Radigue’s early output are presented together for the first time. The anthology concludes with a roundtable discussion between Curtis, Greenstone, and Anthony Vine, unraveling the paradoxes at the core of Radigue’s artistic vision to follow the thread of her enduring “ethos of resistance.”

This book was selected by Tique for Objects & Sounds.