FREE DOWNLOADS ON MY BANDCAMP PAGE!

As an independent, alternative musician, doubting more and more the relevance of my stubbornness to exist in the creative ecosystem of "serious" ambient and electronic music (😀😀😀), let me kindly remind you that I offer on Bandcamp THREE retrospective / compilation albums retracing my musical journey FOR FREE / NAME YOUR PRICE.

I just want to share my music, submit it to your listening, take the risk of your feedback, negative or positive...

So... here are three links to my "musical calling cards" on Bandcamp!

 

link > Ambient Variations

 

 link >  Ambient Explorations

 

 

link >  Ambient Transpositions

 




Thanks for visiting my Bandcamp page and for listening to my music!

A FEW VISUAL VARIATIONS FOR MY SPOTIFY CANVAS...

 Link to my Spotify page

Between you and me... A confidence!

 

As you know perhaps, "Cités Analogues" is a milestone in Lightwave career, the first "concept album" produced by Christoph Harbonnier and me...

Christoph remastered and remixed the original Revox tapes, and we released this first digital version on Lightwave Bandcamp page...

Link

We learnt today that a major German label of electronic music is willing to release it as a CD and even as a vinyl!

We will tell you more as soon as possible... We are so happy and proud our cassette release (!) is considered as a valuable part of the history of European electronic musics...

 

 

ABOUT AMBIENT MUSIC (Again...).

 

                                                   ("Singing in Unison” Yoshi Wada - 1977)

 
Ambient music, in its various forms (dark, lo-fi, meditation etc.) is both a niche genre and a plethoric musical trend, as evidenced by the mass of albums and tracks on Bandcamp and all the platforms (and I contribute to them, of course).

I wonder if this exponential growth is due to the fact that it's relatively easy to compose and produce ambient music compared with other musical genres (jazz, rock, classical, etc.). Most ambient music is produced by solo musicians (although there are a few bands). All you need a minima is a midi keyboard, a computer, a few plug-ins and a DAW - no need for renting a rehearsal and professional recording studio. Ambient music is a genre for “home musicians”, with set-ups that can be very small. It is also characterized by a certain number of formal features - drones, stretched pads, long reverb, arpeggios - which, most of the time, do not require great instrumental dexterity, or even advanced harmonic knowledge, unlike jazz or classical music, for example...

Is ambient the musical genre par excellence for non-musicians? There's nothing pejorative about that: Brian Eno has said it over and over again...

Doesn't one reason for this exponential production also lie in the “utilitarian” nature of ambient music today, listened to as a backdrop for meditation, relaxation, yoga or even falling asleep? Could it be that ambient music reveals a tired, anxious, insomniac society, or one dreaming of spiritual escapism and “mindfulness”?

And finally, while this quantitative explosion of ambient music is of course positive, with more and more people practicing and enjoying it, doesn't it also have perverse effects, making creative breakthroughs and innovations more difficult, both because of the difficulty for them to gain visibility and because of the inertia and habituation effect of a predominantly standardized production?

Just a few questions I ask myself as I reflect on my own musical practice....

MY MUSIC ON ARTCORE.COM

 

   

 

 

I'm starting to distribute my music on the artcore.com platform to reach a new audience of DJs and remixers, electro and chill-out listeners, alongside Bandcamp, which remains my main "base camp", and all the usual streaming and download platforms.

 

I find it interesting and useful to expose my music to different audiences and make my work visible and accessible in a new ecosystem with new search algorithms...

 

I hope to upload most of my discography in the next few days!

 

 

LINK TO MY ARTCORE PAGE

THANKS!

 

 

A very big thank you to all those who support my musical adventure by buying my albums on Bandcamp....  Your support means a lot to me, it's also a strong political and artistic gesture on your part, in favor of independent creation...

(there was a notable peak in purchases on April 17, I don't know why... Review ? Podcast? Blog post? Radio show?).

I was also very touched by the fact that my retrospective album "Ambient Transpositions", offered for free or "Name your price" on my Bandcamp page, was the subject of several purchases alongside the many free downloads!

I'm delighted that my music is alive, circulating and being discovered by new listeners...

Many thanks again for your support!

 

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com

AN EARTHLING'S POINT OF VIEW ON THE SPOTIFY PLANET: A NOTEBOOK OF OBSERVATIONS...

- Some of the most influential ambient playlists in terms of subscriber numbers only offer tracks between 1 minute 30 and 3 minutes, for meditating, relaxing, daydreaming, falling asleep, and so on. As for me, this perpetual zapping would make me dizzy and prevent me from both concentrating and relaxing... Wouldn't you agree?

- From the point of view of the musicians involved: producing ambient pieces lasting around 2 minutes is a particular stylistic exercise... Musical haikus, without the depth and resonance of Japanese poems?

- What explains the success of sleep playlists? Has music become a soporific, and will it be reimbursed by social security?

- Spotify's in-house editorial playlists are the only ones capable of boosting a musician's visibility and listenership. But they only integrate new musicians once a statistical threshold of visibility and listens has been reached. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

- Given that a stream currently only earns a musician 0.004 euros, provided that the track in question has already reached 1,000 non-monetized listens, how many streams does it take to make a return on the sums demanded by playlist curators (“buy me a coffee, 5 euros for sharing your track on my playlist”)  or intermediary platforms that demand a minimum payment of 75 euros to submit your track to unidentified playlists?

- Is it completely utopian to imagine that the human and "organic" factor could, on its own scale, partly compete with the algorithmic steamroller?

For example, if I asked the readers of this post, who know and appreciate my music and are sensitive to my efforts to survive a little, if I asked them to follow my artist profile on Spotify, to listen to a few of my tracks, or even to subscribe to my page, could that make a little difference, as a gesture of support, as an artistic and political manifesto in favor of an independent and uncompromising musical approach?

And couldn't we imagine electronic musicians, struggling to survive in the merciless world of algorithms, supporting each other in this way?

Let's give it a try?

 

LINK TO MY SPOTIFY PROFILE