Christian Wittman Music
A Journey Through Today Ambient, Minimal, Experimental Musics. Releases, Reviews, Making of, Thoughts and Afterthoughts about Electronic Musics.
Saturday, November 9, 2024
REVIEW (MUSIC FOR INSTALLATION II)
Friday, November 8, 2024
Music for Sound Installation II
There's no doubt the memory of having seen some outstanding sound installations, in Linz, at Ars Electronica, and those of Brian Eno, in London and Paris.
Then, of course, there's my experience with Lightwave, where we designed the sound for Anne and Patrick Poirier's installation in Oberhausen's Gasometer, during the “Ich Phoenix” contemporary art festival (lightwave-musique.bandcamp.com/album/in-der-unterwelt).
Not to mention “Cantus Umbrarum”, where we provided sound for hundreds of meters of underground galleries in the Grottes de Choranche (Vercors) during the 38e Rugissants Festival...
But more fundamentally, I like the concept of music designed for a particular place, a particular environment.
A space where you can move around, where you can put the music in space, between multiple dimensions, a physical, multisensory staging of listening....
I conceived this album for such an environment: a journey through places with multi-channel sound, each stage having its own luminous, chromatic and harmonic identity.
I dream of a sound installation where the listener's progress, stops, head movements and gaze determine the rhythm, level and mix of the music...
It may already exist... Or it may soon...
“Music for Installations II” is a new stage in my quest for immersive, multidimensional compositions...
Perhaps multimedia and video designers will come across my music, and my dream of a sound installation will one day become reality...
In the meantime, dear listeners, dear fans of my music, I invite you to listen to my music through headphones, close your eyes, turn around twice and let shapes and colors unfold freely in your imagination!
credits
Concept, sound design, production: Christian Wittman
Recorded and produced at: Nina Studio (Paris)
Monday, October 28, 2024
My Bandcamp Page: Roadmap of a creative journey
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 While the first albums were based on unpublished material recorded in previous years, in the tradition of Lightwave music, in a very “cosmic” and space music style, I then moved towards more minimalist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.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
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.
Saturday, September 28, 2024
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...
Monday, September 23, 2024
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.