Monday 27 July 2026, 7.30pm
A Tribute to Éliane Radigue brings together an evening of deep listening, sustained attention, and immersive sound practice, celebrating one of the most influential figures in electronic and electro-acoustic music. The programme explores Radigue’s patient approach to timbre, resonance, and gradual transformation through performances that engage closely with her compositional methods and sonic world. Using modular synthesis, acoustic instruments, and carefully shaped electronic textures, the evening unfolds as a meditation on tone, duration, and microscopic change, inviting audiences into a concentrated listening environment where fragile harmonics, slow modulations, and near-imperceptible shifts become the centre of musical experience. Rather than spectacle, the night offers intimacy, focus, and sonic immersion — a shared space for attentive listening shaped by Radigue’s enduring legacy.
John Biddulph is a composer, performer, and sound artist working across electro-acoustic music, modular synthesis, and acoustic instrumentation. His practice explores timbre, resonance, microtonality, and deep listening through works that combine electronics with bass clarinet, saxophone, field recordings, voice, and found sound. Drawing on traditions of experimental music, free improvisation, and sonic art, his performances move between fragile near-silence and dense electronic textures, often unfolding through slow transformation and close attention to sonic detail.
His compositions and live works have been presented in festivals, galleries, theatres, and experimental music contexts across the UK and internationally, including projects connected to the Darwin Festival, Exile Festival, and performances linked to electro-acoustic and site-responsive practice. Recent works include Hibakusha (performed at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka), Threnody for Tehran, The Sonic Microscope, and Voyage of the Beagle, all of which foreground listening as both a musical and perceptual act.
Alongside his compositional work, Biddulph is an active live performer, creating immersive solo performances using modular synthesiser systems, live processing, and acoustic instruments. His work frequently engages with architecture, memory, environmental sound, and the unstable behaviour of electronic systems.
In 2026/27 he was awarded a prestigious Britten Pears Arts Award in recognition of his developing project The Sonic Microscope, an exploration of microscopic sonic change, timbral perception, and immersive listening practices.
Website – https://www.handmadesound.co.uk
Bandcamp – https://handmadesound.bandcamp.com
Instagram - @handmadesound
Performance
For A Tribute to Éliane Radigue at Cafe OTO, John will present a performance informed by Radigue’s L'Île re-sonante with its patient approach to duration, harmonic drift, and the physical presence of sound, using modular synthesis and other electronics to recreate and inhabit slowly evolving sonic states inspired by this specific electronic work.
Christian Duka is a sound artist, musician and spatial audio engineer based in Bologna. His solo practice for electric guitar explores the body resonance and edge tones of a self-built instrument — those fragile margins where instrumental gesture dissolves into the very matter of the signal. The guitar is treated as a vibrating organism and as a transducer: a surface through which to listen to electromagnetic forces, parasitic frequencies and the micro-instabilities that normally remain below the threshold of musical attention.
Artistic director and co-founder of Amoenus, Christian has worked for years on immersive listening and Ambisonics systems, developing installations and performances that weave together psychoacoustics, environmental data sonification and deep listening traditions. His curatorial work includes the Sonic Garden and Kopshti Zanor event series. He has collaborated with artists including John Butcher, Ute Kanngiesser, Sharon Gal and Marco Maldarella (MARMO), and his research moves across experimental electronics, improvisation, participation and ecological thought.
Performance
Christian will be exploring Éliane Radigue’s composition Jetsun Mila with the electric guitar setting it in resonance to create morphing drones and live granular synthesis as a method of layering.
Simon has worked in theatre & contemporary dance for several years working both as a composer, sound designer and more recently as a sound engineer. His work combines the cello with processing & electronics. His work has been described as “electro-orchestral drone-scapes of, by turns, gauzy intimacy and soaring grandeur”, “highly evocative work of the otherworldly transforms the recognisable into something mysterious, even on occasion, the supernatural”. Being of mixed ethnicity & recently diagnosed with epilepsy these experiences inform & guide his practice, exploring themes of otherness and fragility.
Simon will perform a work inspired by the composing techniques and strategies found in Éliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak, a landmark work for solo cello that explores the instrument’s unstable wolf tone and its extraordinary world of slowly evolving resonance. Through minute shifts in timbre, tuning and harmonic interaction, the piece invites a deep, focused listening in which the smallest sonic changes become richly expressive.
