WHAT IS COMPOSING MUSIC?

 

It can be intellectual, planned, calculated, written down and fully mastered.

My approach is more intuitive, less controlled...

 

I see my DAW (Ableton Live) as a kind of playground, an abacus, a chessboard.

After recording the basic tracks and listening to each other, it's time to edit.

I approach this stage in visual terms, and sculpt the music by shifting, erasing, superimposing patterns, playing with colors and silence, playing with superimpositions, alignments, phase shifts...

 

Often, it's visual intuition rather than sound or harmony that guides me through this stage.

I erase, shift, copy and paste patterns, from one track and color to another.

The tracks on my DAW are like a checkerboard where I move sounds and patterns around.

I don't calculate. I obey intuitions, and interact with my listening to the piece, in real time.

I have the impression of composing with a form of floating attention, of free listening, which suggests to me in the moment this or that act of editing.

 

I don't know how to qualify or define this process.

 

It's a particular level of consciousness, where choices and decisions impose themselves on me, without my thinking about them in a reasoned way.

 

I very rarely "undo" these editing gestures.

 

When I listen to them again and again, they impose themselves by their relevance.

The grids and tracks of my DAW are like an African divination table, where displacements, deletions and manipulations obey secret necessities, beyond the randomness of appearances...

 

And what is written, in this form of musical writing interacting with the visual structure of the tracks, is music that is unthought of, but felt, that imposes itself by its necessity and its obviousness...