My Bandcamp Page: Roadmap of a creative journey

 

Link to my Bandcamp Page

My Bandcamp page is like a roadmap of my musical journeys. Since the beginning of March 2022, my 65 albums are all milestones in an ongoing adventure.

Over the past two and a half years, my music has evolved, as have my instruments... While the first albums were based on unpublished material recorded in previous years, in the tradition of Lightwave music, in a very “cosmic” and space music style, I then moved towards more minimalist albums, reflecting my fascination with the ambient music of Brian Eno and Harold Budd in particular, and then towards albums open to a certain abstraction, on the borderline between electro-acoustic and contemporary chamber music, mixing electronic textures and acoustic instruments modified by various sound treatments.

These three coherent threads intersect and unfold over time:

- space music, following on from the experimental phase of the Berlin School and the first Lightwave albums

- ambient and minimalist music

- mixed chamber music, atmospheric classical...

My 65 albums were conceived and assembled from hours of recording, experimentation, improvisation and sound research.

Each album is built around a sound palette, a concept, artwork and the choice of certain instruments, limiting dispersion and favoring the deep exploration of a predetermined technical set-up.

I'm once again offering my entire Bandcamp discography at a 75% discount:

77 euros for 65 albums! That's just over one euro per album!

This is your chance to immerse yourself in my musical workshop and follow the threads of my creative labyrinth...

Almost three days and nights of non-stop ambient music!

And you'll also be supporting independent music creation, in a direct, personalized relationship between listeners and musicians, the antithesis of the algorithmic anonymity of streaming platforms.

 

THOUGHTS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS : MINIMALISM

 

                                                     Yoko Ono. "Secret Piece" (1953)

I've always been interested in minimalist music, although this label can encompass very different styles.

Among my favorite musicians are Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveiros, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Toru Takemitsu, Harold Budd, Brian Eno, Peter Michael Hamel (non-exhaustive list...).

In my personal musical practice, I have been led to reflect more precisely on this concept of minimalism.

It seems to me that there are two ways of approaching it: from the musician's point of view, and from the listener's point of view.

From the musician's point of view, first of all. The sophistication of today's instruments and the multitrack recording capabilities of DAWs encourage overload, both in terms of instrumental tracks and sound processing levels. The natural inclination of the electronic musician is to achieve “big sound”, by superimposing tracks, multiplying rhythmic lines, drums and sequences, saturating sound space, and fearing emptiness and a drop in tension.

In my own musical practice, as I've already written, the main step consists in erasing, purifying, emptying, slipping in silence - in short, letting sound and silence breathe together.

This minimalism is also that of some painters, architects or sculptors, who avoid overload and filler to concentrate on the essence.

We could call this procedure “subtractive composition”. It can be governed by various rules, mathematical combinatorics, crossed time scales, or by the intuition of creative and reflexive listening, of a floating attention that recomposes the sound spectrum of a composition by successive withdrawals of all that is secondary and accessory.

 

           Toshi Ichiyanagi “Stanzas for Kenji Kobayashi”  (1961)

 

Secondly, from the listener's point of view.

We need to learn to listen to music from a minimalist perspective: for example, to discern the thread or threads running through the musical composition and follow them in their continuity, to perceive the scansion of silences, to discern the sound planes and their architecture, in short, to unfold in listening the space-time of a composition, in terms of volumes, surfaces, lines and vectoriality.

The listener can also choose this minimalist listening approach with compositions that are not specifically minimal. I've often listened to an album by Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze, for example, and become attached to a polyphonic or melodic line in particular, the punctuation of a bass, the loops of a sequence, and give that particular element a particular relief, recreating and modifying my perception of the whole piece. The same goes for listening to a jazz standard or a classical composition: I like to isolate, for example, Gary Peacock's bass playing in Keith Jarrett's trio, or to follow a particular melodic line in a Bach concerto, then gradually integrate a second, then a third.

The listener's ear is thus a musical instrument in its own right, with its own sensitivity and settings, its own memory and culture: it adds the final touch to the musical composition, bringing it into the realm of both physical materiality and intersubjective communication.

 

 

Alien Garden

 

"Alien Forest"... I love to explore possible worlds through my music... This little clip is perhaps the starting point of a new album, who knows....

Learning Seaboard: Immersion in new sonic oceans...

 

 

Last night, a dizzying immersion in a new multidimensional musical universe...

 

First experiments with my new Seaboard Rise keyboard from ROLI : sculpting soundscapes in five dimensions and rediscovering the infinite possibilities of the hand and finger on a tactile surface...

 

A new approach to gestures on a musical keyboard: caress, percussion, climb, cross, sink, fly...

 

The keyboard becomes a harp, a ondes martenot, a futuristic orchestra, a modular synthesizer facade with a thousand possible settings, unfolding new worlds of sound...

 

I begin my learning curve in this new MIDI environment with a totally psychedelic immersion.

 

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/

https://open.spotify.com/.../artist/4q4V7ci4nsWYEoPSb09voh

 

 

THOUGHTS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS: ABOUT ABSTRACTION

 

I love abstraction in music. In the music I listen to, and in the music I create myself.

This is undoubtedly due to the formatting of my musical ear over the years, to the fine tuning of my listening.

Among a few landmarks of my musical education, certain experimental parts of Pink Floyd, and then of course the beginnings of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, then the discovery of electro-acoustic and contemporary music, a certain form of free jazz or improvised music.

Abstraction is first and foremost an experience of uprooting oneself from familiar landmarks and immediate, illustrative and figurative references. Musical abstraction leads to a different listening experience, as it is not preformatted by predictable compositional patterns. If it can generate a certain discomfort, it also reconfigures listening by giving an active role to the listener, who must invent his or her own reference points, his or her own grids of apprehension.

I think it's also a way of apprehending music in its very essence, without projecting a pre-established narrative or descriptive filter, freeing oneself from the expectations of a familiar musical form, be it classical music (concerto, symphony, etc.) or certain rock standards (verses, choruses, etc.).

As a musician, abstraction for me is associated with the idea of creative freedom, of exploring and experimenting with sound worlds of different architecture, comfortable or not, intellectually and sensorially challenging.

Above all, abstract music is a form of experience requiring active involvement on the part of the listener to enter a parallel universe with its own rules, in terms of geometry, volume, color and movement.

In this respect, abstract music is comparable to an abstract painting or sculpture: escaping the most immediate interpretative grids, it opens up a multisensory reception space in which the listener plays an active role, projecting onto the sounds his or her own auditory memory, imagination, reference points and visualizations.

"PAR VENTS ET MAREES": A COLLABORATION ALBUM WITH ANDREW HEATH!

 Dear all,

I am very happy and proud to share with you my collaboration with my friend and fellow ambient musician Andrew Heath, released by the Dutch label Slow Tone Collage (a subdivision of Shimmering Moods).

I hope you will enjoy this album as much as we do! 

 

This immersive collaboration between the UK based musician, Andrew Heath and French musician, Christian Wittman charts a musical voyage that explores themes of great tides that rise and fall and of air currents that flow between lands and seas.

Dense clouds and currents of electronic sound are permeated with sharp, pin-pricks of percussion and modular noises with drifting piano, both electric and acoustic along with guitar notes that float above the maelstrom. All bound with field recordings that resonate sympathetically alongside the drifting tones.

Sometimes light, sometimes dark - evoking the contrast between the apparent calm of the sea, and the dynamics and flows that unfold, both in depth and in the air, creating organic and immersive soundscapes, aerial and underwater at the same time.


As well as many solo releases under his own name, Andrew has collaborated with artists including legendary German musician, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, experimental electronic and classical composer, Christopher Chaplin, Dutch ambient guitarist, Anne Chris Bakker, Argentinian composer Mi Cosa de Resistance and UK artists, Toby Marks (Banco de Gaia), James Osland and Simon McCorry. Andrew has also been commissioned to produce works for film, installations and various arts festivals.

Christian is a founding member of Lightwave, a French group which has been tracing a unique creative path in the field of electronic and ambient musics  (Erdenklang, Hearts of Space, Signatures/Radio France...). They have collaborated with Paul Haslinger (ex-Tangerine Dream), Jon Hassell, Hector Zazou among others, and created spectacular sound installations in places such as the Choranche caves in Vercors mountains or the Oberhausen Gasometer in Germany. The many solo releases of Christian chart musical territories at the crossroads of ambient, atmospheric classical and minimalism.

[REVIEW] Ambient Chamber Music

 

 

CHRISTIAN WITTMAN – Ambient Chamber Music

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-chamber-music

"Not only a perfect title but a set of tracks, from just over 5 to nearly 12 minutes in length, that perfect encapsulate what the musician is wanting to create and that is cosmic electronic music in an almost Classical setting without actually sounding Classical or Orchestral. From the opening 10 minutes of “Hybrid Dreamscape” onwards, this is synths and electronic music that is at the hinterland between space and strings, with a feel, flow and form that is utterly engaging, and continues in this vein right to the end, but in the process, explores some magnificent and magical soundscapes, along the way. 

 In many ways and many areas along the journey, the sound is similar to what you hear on the first and last tracks on Tangerine Dream's epic “Zeit” album, with that heady mix of synths and strings, exploring a darkness that is completely outer space, yet retaining a light to which you are inexorably drawn. In fact, there are times where you are most certainly hurled back into the early seventies adventures of the drummer-less Tangerine Dream, as the music moves through time and space with a cosmic purpose on a seemingly unending journey that you have to take. 

It's not all cosmic icing though, in fact very little of this is what the American synth fraternity would describe as “blissful”, and a lot of it is quite dark while not being dense, unafraid at times to voyage into more avant-garde realms, but then quickly emerging to trace a whole new path through the cosmos. Easily one of his best albums for a while, this transfixes and maintains its quality throughout, always moving, sometimes subtly, and always taking you along for the ride."

Andy Garibaldi, review published in Audion #79,  p. 40.