OUMUPO ("Ouvroir de Musique Potentielle")

 

How could I put my music into words?
How could I describe what comes out of my keyboards and virtual instruments that I consider to be "my" music?

And am I in the best position to talk about it?

I'm not a programmer or a "composer" in the strict sense.

I see myself more as a craftsman, using sounds and sonic spaces as others use colors, shapes and materials: as a medium for a creative performance, where intuition and improvisation play an essential role.

There's a necessity, a logic to improvisation: at a given moment, while composing my palette of sounds, setting up spatialization effects, my fingers on the keyboard find the right tempo, the right tonalities, the right harmonic path... It could not be otherwise...

Basically, I'm following threads of intuition, a bit like the "automatic writing" of surrealist poets like André Breton, Soupault and co (all things being equal, of course).

But to continue this literary metaphor, I'm probably also close to OULIPO, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, represented by writers like Raymond Queneau, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Pérec, Jacques Roubaud and many others...

We should create OUMUPO, L'Ouvroir de Musique Potentielle... whose founding text could be the "Oblique Strategies" card game created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.

"Oblique Strategies" means reintroducing the rules of the creative game into a combinatory of possibilities...

One of these rules, in my musical work, is the staggered duplication of the same track on several instruments. This shift creates a series of random events within a predefined harmonic structure. What would otherwise be pure superposition, even if shifted, is most often cut and sculpted by silences through an editing stage...

 The result is random music edited by human decision...