On Composition (I)

 

Tonight I recorded a piece entitled “Procession”. Multi-track work on my DAW, Ableton Live.

Four stereo tracks recorded.

The starting point is a very minimalist, repetitive pattern: just four notes, two long, two short, separated by long silences. It's not copy and paste. I play my four notes again and again, with slightly different phrasing and velocity. It's a prepared, percussive piano sound.

Track 2 is an equally minimalist motif, but different, in the same scale, with a soprano voice articulating different vowels, which I combine with key switches. An ethereal, minimalist voice that I spatialize with a reverb plug-in and a multieffect that wraps the sound in a kind of halo.

Track 3 is created from a viola sound, with a soft sustain: I immediately found the harmonic and melodic counterpoint that slips in in response to the soprano voice, with multiple variations that create ever-changing effects of superposition and phase shift.

Track 4 is a copy/paste of track 3, but shifted, and with a bass singer voice.

I dose the effects again on tracks 3 and 4.

Listen, listen again. I clean up the songwriting: I delete some patterns. I shift others. I delete again.

Emptiness and silence make the music breathe.

On all four tracks, I adjust a spatialization effect that rotates sounds and patterns in the stereo spectrum.

I listen and listen again.

I adjust the levels of each track to the nearest millimeter, fine-tuning my mix with my Sennheiser HD 650 headphones, the faithful companion of my musical adventures...

I listen and listen again.

I use Ozone with my usual settings to balance the final mix.

I export the audio in wav. in high definition.

 I listen to it.

Again and again.

 
I like this track.

I didn't think, calculate, write or plan it.

It was created under my fingers, as I listened, intuitively, as I listened to what I was playing.

An improbable, unthought-of creation that came about naturally, without tedious research or trial and error.

Obeying the intuition and unconsciousness of my listening, and an indefinable flow between my gaze on the computer screen, my fingers on the keyboard, my listening, the images and ideas that arise freely, a digital, sonic, musical artifact was created this evening.

I define myself, like Brian Eno, as a non-musician (i.e. with no academic musical background), nevertheless creating something that has to be called music, for want of a better term.

My creative process is intuitive, unconscious and largely uncontrolled, because it's produced in the moment, a bit like the automatic writing of the French Surrealist poets who let words and metaphors rush through their uncontrolled pen.

“Procession”.

I love this song.

I listen to it and will listen to it often, wondering about the chance and necessity that allowed its genesis.

At the moment, “Procession” is part of an album project entitled “Akousmata”. I already have eight tracks for this project. “Akousmata” obviously refers to the current of so-called ‘acousmatic’ music, that is, music that is a little abstract and experimental, aiming to create a different listening experiences. “Akousmata” also refers to the Greek tradition of esoteric and initiatory knowledge, transmitted by word of mouth in certain philosophical schools, such as the Pythagoreans.

I love this idea of passing on hidden knowledge, a vision of the world, mathematical and harmonic keys to thinking about the universe we live in and our place in it.

Tonight's “Procession” is a tiny milestone on this path where knowledge and spirituality intersect, through the mysterious power of sounds and harmonics.