Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue book launch
Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue book launch
Éliane Radigue’s studio at 22 rue Liancourt, Paris, ca. 1980s. Courtesy Fonds Éliane Radigue.
Blank Forms
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Join us to launch Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue, the tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms Editions. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, interviews, and commissioned essays, this compendium interrogates the French composer’s idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification, and the very experience of listening.
Listen to Biogenesis (1973, heartbeats and ARP 2500 synthesizer on magnetic tape), followed by a conversation between Alien Roots co-editors Charles Curtis and Lawrence Kumpf.
CHARLES CURTIS is one of the premiere avant-garde cellists of the modern era. Trained at Juilliard, Curtis was also a pupil both of vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and composer La Monte Young, and he is one of the few musicians to have mastered Young’s rigorous practice of just intonation. He has performed modern classical, minimalist, and chamber music compositions all around the world, and numerous major composers—including Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, Christian Wolff, Alison Knowles and Tashi Wada—have written works specifically for him. A longtime contributor to Blank Forms, Curtis performed La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Just Charles & Cello in the Romantic Chord in 2023, marking the twentieth anniversary of the composition. In 2019, he performed in Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean tour, a series of non-transferable solo and ensemble pieces composed by Radigue for individual instrumentalists. Currently, Curtis is a Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, a member of Blank Forms’s curatorial advisory board, and a co-editor of Blank Forms’ tenth and final anthology, Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue.
Lawrence Kumpf is the founder and Artistic Director of Blank Forms. He has curated exhibitions such as “Henning Christiansen: Freedom Is Around the Corner” (2018) at 55 Walker Street, New York; “Catherine Christer Hennix: Traversée du Fantasme” (2018) at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and “Open Plan: Cecil Taylor” (with Jay Sanders) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016). He is the editor of the Blank Forms journal and of Catherine Christer Hennix: Poësy Matters and Other Matters (Blank Forms Editions, 2019).