Interview by Philip Durand.
- Your latest album, Apeiron, seems to move in new musical directions...
- Yes... There are many elements of continuity with my previous recordings, such as themes that cross history, science and philosophy, to renew the traditional genre of space music... But there's also a step forward, towards more abstract and contemporary music, while remaining accessible, in the genre of "serious" ambient music that deserves to be listened to for its own sake, and not just as a simple sonic backdrop.
- Can you explain what you mean by this "step forward"?
- There's an attempt to deepen an approach in which silence and slowness hold an important place, but also to seek new modes of interaction between pure sound design and melodic lines. Apeiron also reflects my current interests as a music lover and listener: I'm listening more and more to music that's described as "contemporary classical", at the crossroads of ECM New Series productions (Arvo Pärt, Silvestrov, etc.) and the neoclassical, atmospheric works of musicians like Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter and Johann Johannsson, who are creating a new sound and style for film music.
- Your sound spectrum seem to have been recomposed, with a greater proportion of sampled instruments than the purely synthetic palette?
- I think this reflects the new and constantly expanding field of virtual instruments available on the market. For musicians interested in sound experimentation, today's resources are very extensive, inviting both technical and aesthetic choices. For my part, I find it exciting to seek new balances between palettes of sampled classical instruments and voices, and purely electronic sounds. It should also be pointed out that the latest generation of sound banks are genuine instruments, with a wide range of expressive and musical possibilities (legato, etc.), and that sound processing tools (reverb, multieffects, etc.) enables them to be transformed and customized for singular musical universes like mine...
- Can you tell us more about your composing style?
I keep an intuitive and spontaneous approach, which is built up in successive stages: choosing a sound palette, recording a first track, then a second, a third, and so on... This is the stage of a first draft, of an initial shaping that delimits a frame for the forthcoming musical track. Then comes the crucial editing and composition stage, which essentially consists in sculpting, track by track, note by note, voids and solids, i.e. sounds and silence. This stage is the most important for me: creating means eliminating, reducing, making sounds breathe, knitting and interweaving them from one track to the next.
This work is done in multiple listening sessions, bar by bar, until the first recorded draft is reduced to the essential, where each sound, each note, each motif responds to a necessity. At the same time, I fine-tune the spatialization effects, to bring relief, depth and movement to the stereo field. The final composition thus emerges at the end of a long process of tactile operations, deletions and displacements of sound objects. It's an empirical, intuitive process, guided by listening and in-the-moment decisions. The best parallel, for me, is with the work of a painter or sculptor who creates his work by successive retouching, looking at it from a multitude of points of view. And there's also an intuition that tells me that at a given moment, the piece has reached its point of equilibrium, its final form, and that nothing more should be touched, at the risk of upsetting that equilibrium...
- Is it easy to develop a "singular musical universe" like yours, difficult to fit into a well-defined musical genre or marketing niche?
- I'm well aware of the difficulty of being a bit "unclassifiable", of not fitting into the ambient mainstream, so dominant in Spotify playlists, with music for yoga, meditation, siesta, sleep etc., nor into the sountrack genre, because I haven't yet had opportunities in this field, nor into "academic" contemporary music, because I don't have a legitimizing curriculum in this area. But basically, since the Lightwave years, I've chosen to create music that I'm passionate about and that really suits my personality and skills, rather than directing it towards this or that more commercial and profitable category... The new musical ecosystem favors both global commercial successes (Taylor Swift... ) as well as independent musicians, whose total creative freedom comes at the price of a certain confidentiality... My aim is to follow my creative itinerary with integrity and consistency, and gradually build up an audience interested in my musical universe, either on Bandcamp or on streaming platforms. I also attach great importance to the critical reception and support of experts and media relays (press, radio, podcasts, playlists) with a vast musical culture, often nourished by years, even decades of listening, and whose reactions are for me a major encouragement as well as a "creative compass".....
- And what are your projects?
I have two albums due for release soon on the Whitelabrecs and DiscoGecko labels. And I'm currently working on a new project, along the lines of Apeiron, which also fits into the Atmospheric Classical niche, according to the aptly named label created by Stephen Hill and Steve Davis in their last Hearts of Space radio program.
