Music for Art Gallery I

 

This album, "Music for Art Gallery I", is inspired by the world of contemporary art - sculptures, video installations, performances, painting - and invites you to a journey through some of the great art capitals of today, from New York to Amsterdam, from Berlin to Athens, from Rome to Los Angeles.

These eight compositions are both ambient and experimental, they are at the crossroads of minimalism, a certain acousmatic abstraction and sound design...

I tried to suggest through sound design the sensory, visual, tactile, spatial universe of contemporary art, with its surfaces, its materiality, its geometry, its perspective games, its architectures of lines and shapes.

"Music for Art Gallery I" is, in a way, a continuation of my album series "Ambient Mapping", "Sound Painting" and "Music for Installations".

It is an ambient music that unfolds contemplative atmospheres in a slow travelling of the gaze and the mind on virtual works, that the listener is invited to imagine....

I hope to initiate a collaboration with art galleries and contemporary artists to inscribe my sound research in real places. 

Electronics, sound design: Christian Wittman
Special guest: The Warburg String Quartet

Artwork: Thierry Moreau

Recorded and produced at Nina Studio, Paris, December 2022.

 

REVIEWS

—  "Conceived as a multi-sensory experiential piece best suited for visual accompaniment of a gallery, the French artist Christian Wittman’s “Manhattan” is a lovely slice of experimental ambient work that finds its home in various nexuses of a venn diagram of several musical schools of thought. Of the piece, Wittman states, “I tried to suggest through sound design the sensory, visual, tactile, spatial universe of contemporary art, with its surfaces, its materiality, its geometry, its perspective games, its architectures of lines and shapes.” The resulting composition is one that is easy to get lost in - all the better to take while you stroll the MOMA or Whitney in Manhattan. "
Ryan HALL (Tome of the Weather Machine,  tometotheweathermachine.com)

— Great sounds and cool production. Beautiful arrangements.
I really enjoyed the ethereal and mysterious mood!  Listnerd 

— "Captivating soundscapes and floating atmosphere.." Music for Home


—  "Two new albums of cosmic synth music, from the increasingly prolific French synthesist, and here you do indeed get two albums of original music without a rhythm in sight.

Of the two, “Art Gallery” is what you'd call the “busiest” as it features more of the piano/electric piano (I can never tell!!) with compositions ranging from just under 4, to over 7 minutes, and the depth of sound is fairly vast, for such a spacey album, so that, while there aren't huge arsenals of electronics, the textural qualities of the compositions, comes into play, so that it's got several layers on which to focus at any one time, layers that are constantly on the move, albeit slowly, and all the while, managing to retain every bit of emotion that you could wring out of such ethereal yet gorgeously compelling, spacetronic music.

“Windy Lands”, however, is an album that builds. Again, all cosmic, and this time more predominantly electronic, it starts very minimally, then, as the tracks progress, so the sonic canvas spreads out and stretches across the horizons, to reveal new textures, new layers and give the music more strength and depth, as it progresses, almost “orchestral”, in a minimal sense, on the final couple of tracks, and, overall, a worthy addition to the “Art” album, in that they come from the same beating heart, but travel in different directions."
Andy Garibaldi, Inkeys (UK)