Éliane Radigue was a French composer, born on 24 January 1932 and died on 23 February 2026, whose long, slowly changing electronic works are among the cornerstones of drone music. In the mid-1950s she worked with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, the founders of musique concrète, and kept from them the conviction that any sound could become music, while moving towards something far more still.
In the early 1970s, after contact with the American scene around Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick, she adopted the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer, which she nicknamed Jules and used as her main instrument for roughly twenty-five years. From it she built pieces of paired oscillators, beating harmonics and filtered noise that evolve almost imperceptibly, among them Trilogie de la Mort, first presented in 1988. Around 2000 she set the synthesizer aside and began the Occam series, close collaborations with individual acoustic musicians, in which time, silence and space remained the essential materials.