Time stretches out, punctuated by melodic sketches, scattered and random, like birdsong in a deep forest… These crystalline notes are woven together as you listen, creating subtle embroideries on the fabric of silence…
Morton Feldman is one of my favorite musicians of the moment…
I'd like to use electronics to approach the purity of these pianistic arabesques, so inventive in their radical minimalism…
On first listen, "Lateral" is a return to the roots: those of "Thursday Afternoon" and the other long ambient pieces accompanying Brian Eno's installations. Eight tracks, each around eight minutes long, to be listened to like a long, continuous suite, without any break. Listened to in shuffle mode, the album lends itself to hours of variations in the same sonic and immersive continuum.
The eight tracks are named “Big Empty Country I, II, III, IV etc.”, like so many movements of the same work, a nod perhaps to the musical genre of the album “Luminal”, which I'll comment on in another post, but also, perhaps, a refusal of any referential instructions, an ironic evocation of the ambient genre, furnishing music for empty rooms, or a sonic tabula rasa that the listener is invited to furnish and decorate as he or she pleases, like a blank screen on which to project inner images. ..
The album title “Lateral” is a kind of riddle, when you look at the cover: two luminous discs integrated into a square (squaring the circle?)...
The minimalist choice of a same sound color, a same instrumental palette throughout the album, enriched by infinite microvariations, also takes us back to the roots of Eno's music and of the ambient genre. Ethereal pads, diaphanous piano outlining possible melodic lines, slow waves of sound surging in loops reminiscent of the Revox magnetic tape experiments of the past...
This is a slow, immersive music, with filtered sounds, that unfolds like a long, luminous, shimmering ribbon, lending itself to a floating, enveloping listening experience. Harmonic layers with a thousand reflections, punctuated by suspended notes...
We are now in a times of profusion of tools for virtual studios, of ad nauseam declensions of sample libraries, and the algorithmic tyranny of playlists favors muzak by the mile when it isn't created by an AI that produces the lowest common denominator of musicality.
Brian Eno, remaining true to his identity and artistic vision, once again stands outside fashion, that is, outside time, with an ambient work that combines simplicity and sophistication, minimalism and harmonic architecture...
Once again, a great lesson in ambient composition, and, for me at least, the promise of a never ending musical pleasure...
The Revenant is one of those films that I never tire of seeing again, and that has had a haunting effect on me.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy star in this 2015 film by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.
It's a story of survival and revenge, but above all it's an immersion into the lives of American trappers and soldiers, as well as the various tribes of Native Americans, in the early 19th century, and into the immense, desolate landscapes of the plains, forests and mountains of a still untamed America.
Immersion in a world where water, forests, ice and snow, wood and rock are omnipresent, along with wild animal life. A harsh, hostile world for the group of hunters and their scout, exposed to attacks from Indians and wild beasts, and to competition between trappers.
The landscapes, filmed in panoramic widescreen with great depth of field (the director of photography is Emmanuel Lubezki), are characters in their own right in the film, whether they be the waves of the Missouri river, forests streaming with water or covered in snow, immense plains surrounded by mountains or roamed by herds of ghostly bison...
Twilight, endless expanses, walking to the end of exhaustion in an attempt to regain the human world, bloodied and breathless bodies, the survival drive exacerbated by the desire for revenge, omnipresent violence and cruelty, dreamlike escapes into the world of the dead and memories, paternity and betrayal, love and murderous rage...
The magnificent soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) plays an essential role: minimalist, atmospheric, alternating between the dreamlike fluidity of ondes Martenot (or equivalent) and the unleashing of tribal percussion (for the final battle scene), between sounds lost in a reverberation as vast as the immense expanse of the landscape, or slow, pared-down melodic sketches, expressive and melancholy, blending strings and electronics.
The Revenant's music is subtly atmospheric, based on a sound design as sophisticated as it is minimalist, and blends perfectly with the film's desolate, twilight landscapes and its unforgettable plot.
Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto offer a magnificent lesson in musical and sound design, and we can only be grateful that Alejandro G. Iñárritu chose their experimental, minimalist proposal for his film.
A true masterpiece...
I wonder if there's a program that can transform images into music?
There's MetaSynth from UI Software….
Are there any other similar instruments?
I'd like to translate nuances of color into nuances of sound, and the layering of planes and horizons into nuances of spatial depth.
The image could also visually define the shapes of sound waves, their reliefs, their outlines, their extension, between verticality, horizontality, diagonals, geometric shapes and points.
And there would of course be a sonic translation of the image's rhythms, marked or subliminal.
This photograph, which I took on a beach in northern Brittany, could give rise to a beautiful ambient composition, both linear and punctuated by infinitesimal sound elements.
The waves gently breaking on the shore could also be translated into sound waves rolling slowly through stereophonic space...
Is MetaSynth the only tool that would allow me to move in this direction?
I think I first heard Pink Floyd in 1971 or 1972, with Atom Heart Mother and Meddle.
And my first concert was in January 1973, at the Palais des Sports in Paris, where Pink Floyd accompanied Roland Petit's ballets: an unforgettable sensory, visual and aural experience!
The official release of the restored video and remixed album Pink Floyd at Pompeii, - MCMLXXII brings back many memories - I remember seeing the film on French public television when I was young, and I was able to buy a bootleg CD of the soundtrack.
The sound of the double CD remixed by Steven Wilson is flawless, excellent. It perfectly recreates what Pink Floyd sounded like live in the 70s.
I've never stopped listening to and loving this music. I grew up with it. It made me dream and fly in the outer (or inner?) space...
Listening to this soundtrack again, in the near-perfect version of this remix, inspires me to reflect on a few things...
Firstly, the perfect synergy of a band where everyone's talents contributed to an overall sound and feel. This is as true for the vocals - Rick Wright and David Gilmour on Echoes - as it is for the alchemy of the overall instrumental sound, lead guitar, keyboads, bass, drums.
Pink Floyd's music has always had a strong identity in the field of progressive rock... It didn't rely on the virtuosity of its instrumentalists, like Yes, for example. After their debut with Syd Barrett, they broke away from the pop song format. It embraced a certain sonic experimentation not found in Genesis or King Crimson, but rather in Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze (who influenced whom? The subject is still open...).
With relatively classic instrumentation (the VCS 3, if I'm not mistaken, only appeared with The Dark Side of the Moon), but boundless inventiveness, in the use of effects (delays, loops...) as well as in the sequence of climates (A Saucerful of Secrets, Echoes, One of these Days) and dramatic climaxes (Careful with that axe, Eugene), Pink Floyd invites listeners on psychedelic journeys, inspiring multiple images and sensations.
Pink Floyd at Pompeii remains astonishingly innovative and ground breaking, more than fifty years after this recording.
The instrumental sound remains magnificent, between Rick Wright's keyboards and David Gilmour's guitar.
Nick Mason brings a unique percussive swing, enhanced tenfold by his recorded loops.
The whole thing floats in an unlikely, vintage space of time, no doubt... I find that the abstract sound effects on Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun or A saucerful of secrets remain unrivalled today - from the echo on Rick Wrigh's keyboard playing and Gilmour's guitar to the loops of Nick Mason's drums.
Limited technical resources were compensated by boundless inventiveness...
We hear musicians immersed in an unprecedented experimental trip, who have found in concert situations, with or without an audience, a unique space for expression and creative expansion...
I never tire of listening to these vintage musical trips...
Pink Floyd's music, from the 70s, tells stories, explores territories, maps out possible universes, explores the depths of our imaginations... It leads listeners to immerse themselves in sound worlds that hybridize genres - blues, rock, electro-acoustic experimentation - to generate their own images and inscribe their own memories, over the course of live performances that weave multidimensional sound with the sensory bombardment of light shows out of the ordinary since the early days...
I know that this famous piece, 4'33", which contributed to John Cage's fame, can come across as a provocation or a joke...
But I find this moment from a Berliner Philharmoniker concert conducted by the great Petrenko absolutely brilliant and moving...
What is silence? Can we listen to silence? What is the sound of silence?
Petrenko tries to grasp and embrace silence, with so expressive gestures, bare hands and an inhabited gaze... There is music in his gestures...
What is a collective, staged silence for musicians? and for an audience?
This excerpt from a concert in the background raises a question: what can be communicated, transmitted and shared through sound and silence? What kind of time is shared in a concert hall, between artists and a crowd of spectators?
This concert extract is not unlike a sacred ceremony, a magical moment, an extraordinary ritual...
The emotion is palpable, not only on the part of the maestro and the musicians, but also on the part of the perfectly silent audience - no one coughs!
I don't proceed by algorithms or abstract schemes, as John Cage might have done with the divinatory schemes of the I'Ching, but by listening and editing, stretching the time and inverting certain MIDI tracks, and deleting certain notes in these tracks to create zones of silence.
This phase of my musical work corresponds to the music I'm currently listening to: Morton Feldman, John Cage, Somei Satoh, Toru Takemitsu, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveiros. I'm still a big fan of San Francisco's “New Albion” label, which played a major role in the dissemination of American contemporary and experimental music in particular...
For me, slowness goes hand in hand with the deepening of sound, microvariations and repetitions of certain motifs, creating a thread that takes time to unfold. The minimalism of the playing and sound palette goes hand in hand with the interweaving of different sound planes and the slow displacement of sounds in stereophonic space. This aspect fascinates me, because in a way it gives life and movement to the music, and I see in it an analogy with the slowly rotating celestial vault in a planetarium, or the fluid movements of goldfish turning in the pond of a Japanese garden...
Basically, I think I'm trying to transpose my attraction to Zen Buddhism into music: a kind of immersion in listening and the present moment, here and now, letting thoughts run away, letting images and sensations come and go without trying to control them, as the music breathes.
Through music, I seek to create an immersive, floating listening space that can be heard at different sound levels, at different times of the day. It's basically a return to the profound nature of ambient music, as theorized by Brian Eno, after Erik Satie...
I know that Buddhism was also a source of inspiration for John Cage, Takemitsu, Philip Glass, Eliane Radigue, Meredith Month, and, in the ambient genre, for Robert Rich and others...
Of course, I don't pretend to compare myself to these great names, I simply try to progress along the same path, towards the stripping down of sound, the opening up of listening, and a contemplative, even meditative approach to musical creation.
I'd be delighted if you had the curiosity and time to listen to “Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed”, which is an attempt to move in this direction, and to let me know your impressions, and your criticisms, however harsh!
•• NAME YOUR PRICE UNTIL MAY 10 ••
I am happy to share with you my new album, "Music to Listen to With Eyes
Closed", a bit experimental, a bit abstract, but if you are interested
in my music, you probably know what to expect....
70 mn of music!
Each track marks a passage—not in time, but in depth. You are not
traveling through songs, but through soundscapes and states of
perception: the image behind the eyelid, the silence that carries
memories…
There are no melodies to follow, only atmospheres to drift within. What
remains is suggestion: of rooms that remember you, of unseen horizons,
of a self slowly scattering into the sound field.
It is a Bandcamp exclusivity for now.
My best regards to all!
Christian
This film fascinated me and I never tire of watching it again...
It's an introspective, cerebral, melancholy space opera centered around two characters: Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) and his father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones).
The film could be described as an “Apocalypse Now” in deep space, on the edge of solar system.
The film tells the story of two quests, Clifford McBride's search for traces of intelligent life at the very edge of the solar system: the obsessive quest of an astronaut, a scientist, to unravel the mystery of life and intelligence: are we alone in the universe?
And Roy McBride's quest to find his father, lost in deep space and on the bangs of reason, the solar system and madness.
This film fascinated me by the beauty of the shots... By the vision of what space travel could be, from Earth to the Moon, from the Moon to Mars, from Mars to Neptune, with its logistics, its hubs, its stopover personnel...
But it was above all the sequence of the meeting, and then the heart-rending farewell between the son and father, that really stood out for me... Tragic, moving scenes....
I'm thinking of Clifford Bride's willingness to die in an infinite drift around Neptune, all ties severed with his son, with the promise of inescapable asphyxiation, but, deep down, the fulfillment of his destiny...
I loved the sober, haunted, inhabited acting of the two protagonists... of the two actors who played them...
And this existential confrontation between a son and his father touched me deeply, for personal reasons.
For me, “Ad Astra” is one of those “intelligent” science fiction films that ask questions, give food for thought, and put the human in the foreground. Christopher Nolan's “Interstellar” would be in the same category - and I'll be talking about it soon, no doubt...
A final word to say that Max Richter's soundtrack seems to me to reflect the introspective and dramatic dimension of the film, at the antipodes of John Williams' fanfare for Star Wars, which are not without their qualities, but that's something else...
(“Stanzas for Kenji Kobayashi” Toshi Ichiyanagi - 1961)
"Sans l’impérialisme du concept, la musique aurait tenu lieu de philosophie : c’eût été le paradis de l’évidence inexprimable, une épidémie d’extases."
"Without the imperialism of the concept, music would have taken the place of philosophy: it would have been a paradise of inexpressible evidence, an epidemic of ecstasy."
Cioran, Syllogismes de l'amertume .
Zoe Heath © 2024
All rights reserved
I had the great privilege of benefiting from the artistic talent of Zoë Heath for my latest album, “Akousmata”, produced on the UK label Driftworks run by Andrew Heath.
I had no idea of the extent of Zoë's creative work, and an Instagram link led me to her website:
Her visual and material universe fascinates me, and I'd like to pay a little tribute to her here on my blog.
Zoë is a multidisciplinary artist who defines herself as an explorer of ephemera and texture.
She presents her work in three main categories: collages, paintings and artist's books.
Collages and artist's books are based on the same principle: the assembly of graphic fragments, signs, materials (paper, cardboard, fabric, etc.), photographs and images cut from magazines to create hybrid, unique and singular objects that cannot be reproduced. They remind me of French Surrealist poetry, such as that of Paul Eluard, for whom"the earth is as blue as an orange", or André Breton, who explored dream-like states of consciousness, notably through the use of automatic writing. I'm also thinking of Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror, with its famous image: “Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie” (“Beautiful like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table”).
For unexpected encounters, paradoxical juxtapositions, visual metaphors and oxymorons create a special kind of beauty. Are these “chance meeting”? Or is there a hidden meaning, a profound necessity and logic to these assemblages?
Zoë's collage work also evokes the Lettrist poetry of Tristan Zara or the graphic research of the Russian formalists, suggesting a modernism that is already vintage and imbued with the melancholic patina of time. We're also reminded of children's games with stickers, which take over the space of the sheet with inventive polychromy.
What's most striking in these creations is a kind of fragility and melancholy, which makes them like memories of anonymous lives, snapshots of feelings, ideas and mental images.
One also thinks of the world of Lewis Caroll, so British, of course...
Zoë Heath's “artist's books” are magnificent artefacts created by assembling, folding and binding sheets of paper. One has the impression of opening and leafing through diaries, notebooks of “common places” and memories gleaned over a lifetime, press cuttings, letters, notes from day to day, tree leaves and dried flowers recalling a walk, a place, a day, someone.
Zoe Heath © 2024
All rights reserved
Each page, each inscription or fragment assembled in these artist's books functions as an art of memory: we enter into the intimacy of the artist and the anonymous people whose traces she has gathered, and we ourselves can project our own memories into them.
Each of these “artist's books” is unique, and also tells the story of Zoë's finds at garage sales and flea markets, like a kind of archaeology of what is most fragile in human societies: memory, sensitivity, states of mind that are both ephemeral and leave material traces.
This original, beautiful and sensitive artistic work also reminds me of musical practices.
Sampling, first of all, the art of capturing found sounds and assembling them in a composition that transforms them, changing their meaning and perception.
Then there's mixing and remixing, where the diversity of materials, both sonic and visual, come together to create an organic unity, a balance, a finalized form.
Zoë Heath samples and remixes fragments of life, signs and tactile and visual sensations, with a unique artistic sense and sensitivity.
It's a beautiful universe, and her creative contribution is a real added value for the hand-made packaging of the Driftworks CD collector's editions...
Thank you again, Zoë, for your wonderful work on my music!
(first publication on the Driftworks blog. With kind permission of Andrew Heath)
In my “real life”, I'm a classicist working on Greco-Roman antiquity. I've always been fascinated by this form of transmission of knowledge and wisdom, which didn't involve writing, but was transmitted orally, by word of mouth, from master to disciple.
It was esoteric knowledge, reserved for the initiated, and accessed after various initiation rituals. The Pythagoreans, the Orphics, but also the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle, and later the Neoplatonists, were all familiar with this mode of transmission... But the same initiation practices can be found in Tibetan Buddhism, in the yogi traditions of the Himalayas, and in Taoism too.
I wanted to set this sacred, ritualized universe to music, oscillating between the words of the spiritual masters and the silence of the disciples, creating a harmony that goes beyond language.
Each of your albums has its own particular sound and musical language. What is the sound language of Akousmata?
Indeed, I compose and record in cycles, choosing to limit myself to a particular set of instruments and sound palette. This gives the project its “sound color”, atmosphere and unity. For Akousmata, I favored prepared piano sounds that sound like percussion or gongs, combined with voices and pads, the whole unfolding in vast reverberant spaces, like the crypts of ancient sanctuaries...
There's a certain aleatoric and experimental dimension to this album, and the title Akousmata obviously refers to that current of contemporary electro-acoustic music known as “acousmatic”, which emphasizes the spaces and planes of listening surrounding the listener, and the emphasis on pure sound rather than traditional compositional structures.
Can you tell us more about your compositional process?
I now work exclusively with a “virtual studio” and a vast array of plugins and sound libraries. While the MIDI keyboard remains the input instrument, the composition process takes place in the visual space of a DAW, where each track is visualized as a succession of graphic elements, encoding the note played, velocity and all expressive parameters.
My multitrack work relies heavily on improvisation, i.e. I play while listening to tracks that have already been recorded. It's spontaneous and intuitive, but also obeys unconscious forms of logic and necessity. Every improvisation, even the freest, follows a direction, a thread.
Then comes the actual composition stage, by moving and deleting recorded elements, following both a visual logic – purifying and emptying the DAW tracks, creating silences, symmetries, alternations - and of course a musical logic: my listening is paramount here. It's all very intuitive and instinctive. This compositional process takes the form of a series of editorial decisions on the basic tracks, decisions taken as I listen, without any prior calculation, based on in-the-moment intuitions about the relevance of a note or motif.
So there's an intuitive, if not unconscious, dimension to my musical writing, which somehow brings out the final composition of a plurality of possibilities from the basic tracks recorded. It's not quite the “automatic writing” of the French surrealist poets, but there's nevertheless a very intuitive dimension to my musical workflow...
You're a member of the Lightwave group, which has produced a series of legendary albums, including Cités analogues, Tycho Brahe and Mundus Subterraneus, to name but a few. How do you feel about the difference between collective composition and solo work?
Improvisation, whether total or to some degree, has always been the basis of Lightwave’s studio sessions and concerts. This was possible because of the strong connivance between us, Christoph Harbonnier and myself, as well as with the other regular contributors, Jacques Derégnaucourt, Paul Haslinger and Renaud Pion. We functioned like a small chamber music or jazz ensemble, where music was created through mutual listening and complementary sound palettes, accompanying and sometimes evolving the compositional ideas that emerged. With Christoph, there was always a kind of telepathic, unconscious dimension, where the sounds we generated and our keyboard phrasing sometimes complemented and blended indistinguishably, as if the composition had been written and thought out in advance. I suppose some of Tangerine Dream's early albums were recorded in this way, and in any case, their concerts in the '70s were clearly based on collective improvisation and this technique of playing by listening to each other...
The music we produced, with Christoph and our other friends, was therefore a collective work, which none of us could have produced individually, because it was the result of a complex set of interactions and joint creation, in the adrenalin of improvisation and collective emulation. This encouraged both great restraint and a certain audacity at times - for example, I played the “Cités analogues” solo on my RSFs modular system in a single take, over Christoph's sequences and polyphony, all recorded live on the Revox, and I still don't understand how it could have happened, given that I'm no ace keyboard player...
Composing as a solo musician is naturally a completely different process. You're on your own and no longer have the challenge and incentive of another musician beside you. You're at a different, more personal level of coherence: the music reflects an individual rather than a collective entity. The process is more conscious, more reflexive. You can't take the easy way out and compensate for the absence of your partner's critical eye.
I feel I can progress, deepen and broaden my musical horizon by experimenting with new directions every day. In a way, it's a question of imposing rules and limits on myself, of setting frameworks, and making them evolve while remaining within a sound and a style that are my own. It's a question of evolving within what makes up my musical identity, without giving in, once again, to the complacency and ease of repeating the same thing... Looking back over my solo albums, I see a definite evolution, with thresholds and shifts, even if there are obvious constants.
Your solo musical activity also coincides with a radical technological leap, from hardware to the virtual studio...
Yes. In Lightwave, we started integrating the first virtual instruments into our studio sessions with Reaktor and Absynth from Native Instruments. From the 2000s onwards, I extended this approach, which enabled me to compose and experiment at home, recording on Logic Audio. It has to be said that, given the equipment Lightwave had at the time, it was necessary to have a full dedicated room for our studio. We moved several times, and for several years shared a studio with our friend Hector Zazou in a vast industrial building, where musicians and audio-visual production companies coexisted. Then Christoph converted the garage and basement of his suburban house into the Lightwave studio, and we worked there for several years. This had its advantages: all the equipment was installed, wired and ready for use immediately, in a soundproof space. While Christoph had all the equipment on site, it was a little more complicated for me...
The digital home studio gives us greater flexibility, but we lose direct contact with the machines and have to rethink the way we interact with each other musically. My personal experience, however, is largely positive, at least for my personal musical work.
A hardware studio requires a relatively stable configuration of instruments, effects and cabling. This has the advantage of providing a familiar creative environment and encouraging work routines. The virtual studio, organized by a DAW, does not impose a predetermined configuration. On the contrary, with each new recording session, the musician creates his or her own set-up, choosing instruments and effects and assembling them to suit a particular creative project. It's a bit like setting up a different studio for each recording session, without the tedious task of moving instruments around and rewiring everything...
Added to this is the possibility of composing a palette of sounds from banks of presets and libraries of samples, or experimenting with randomized sound generation, using the randomization functions of certain synthesizers, and serializing processing and spatialization effects according to experimental and sometimes... unorthodox schemes... All this is done on screen, with the mouse, in a great economy of space..
And then, of course, there's the extraordinary possibility of being able to record direct to disk on a DAW, with infinite possibilities for correction and editing that weren't possible with external recorders, such as the Alesis ADATs - they did, however, mark a huge step forward in making digital multitrack recording accessible to independent musicians.
Can you tell us more about your virtual studio?
I've always considered the musical result to be more important than the list of instruments, in the same way that a pastry is judged by its final taste rather than the list of ingredients... LOL... But I can give an outline of my set-up... I've been using a Roli Seaboard keyboard for a few months now, whose ergonomics and feel are very different from a traditional midi keyboard. But the possibilities in terms of expressiveness, modulation, gestures and simply unconventional playing are absolutely fascinating. This keyboard is almost like a modular synthesizer front end, so radically can it transform sounds...
For instruments, I have the usual suspects, in particular plugins from Native Instruments and Arturia. Kontakt has become a must, with a very large number of editors offering original and more or less experimental instruments. I also use instruments from Spitfire and Orchestral Tools, as well as UVI, trying to stray away from the more conventional sounds. My current favorite instruments are experimental and avant-garde synthesizers, specifically designed for adventurous sound design: notably those produced by Traktion and Dawesome.
I also like to experiment with granular synthesis, which produces highly experimental results from existing sound materials - in this way, I “recycle” some of my earlier pieces, which become totally unrecognizable new compositions.... It's a form of radical remix...
Beyond the ergonomic gains and the reconfiguration of your set-up, what is the main contribution of these virtual instruments to your musical work?
I'd say they've enabled me to take my music in new directions, thanks to a renewed palette of sounds. I'm a big fan of classical, contemporary and chamber music, and Lightwave's most recent productions, such as Caryotypes and Bleue comme une orange, have gone in this direction, thanks in particular to Jacques Derégnaucourt, who wrote a string quartet for us. I find it exciting to be able to experiment with “mixed” or hybrid modes of composition, using samples libraries that allow us to approach the phrasing and expressiveness of acoustic instruments or ensembles, or even the human voice. I'm not at all going in the direction of trailers and film music, with compositions that would try to recreate the illusion of a real symphony orchestra.
But mixing sampled and purely electronic textures opens up infinite possibilities - minimalist, atmospheric, contemporary. More generally, the sound palette I have at my disposal today far exceeds that of my hardware instruments, allowing me to combine FM, granular, analog emulation and sampling syntheses.
The vast range of possible choices can be confusing at times, but remains a formidable invitation to creativity...
And finally, where does Lightwave stand today?
I'm still in close contact with Christoph, who has moved to a farm in a small village in Burgundy. This remoteness doesn't make things any easier, especially as Christoph is thinking of recreating the studio into a barn, which would require a lot of work... Over the last few months we've undertaken the backup of all Lightwave's recordings over the years, copying Revox, DAT, ADAT tapes onto hard disk... There are dozens of hours of studio sessions and live recordings, spanning our entire period of activity, and multi-track recordings naturally lend themselves to a whole lot of editing and mixing work.
In recent years, Christoph has collaborated extensively with Michel Redolfi on sound design projects, notably for urban transport in major French cities, but also on the sound design for the Nausicaa oceanographic center in Boulogne-sur-Mer.
We are also still in contact with Paul Haslinger, who is pursuing his career as a film composer in Los Angeles, and we regularly discuss the idea of new collaborations.
So hopefully, we will have exciting news to share in the near future...
