ACHERON — COMING SOON

 

  

Why and when release a new album?

How do I decide that a musical project deserves to be released from my personal archive to be shared, circulated, and risk being listened to multiple times, here and elsewhere?

Among my works in progress, I think Acheron is ready to venture into the vast digital ecosystem of ambient music....

The basic tracks were recorded between February and March 2025.

I listened to this draft album a thousand times...

I love this music, slow, ambient, immersive, with a random dimension... Music that lives and moves in stereo space, enveloping the listener in its harmonic wake...

I feel good in this music... It's the music I love to listen to, the music I love to create...

This music is a mirror of my soul, of my state of mind when I composed it...

Regardless of its possible technical imperfections (if there are any...), my music is deeply human and artisanal, no AI, it is human intelligence and skills (with their strength and  limitations) that drive the tools and instruments of my studio...

Tonight, I reworked the entire album,  Acheron.

I think I've overcome some of my doubts after listening to it dozens of times...

I decided to shorten the length of the tracks, make them denser and more concise, and tighten up the flow of the album.

I think it works better. More coherent... 

It is this “short” version that I will release (online on September 5, Bandcamp Day...).
 

Acheron is a new and coherent step in my journey... and I love  very much this album, ambient, abstract, post Brian Eno...

The sounds, the movement in the stereo space, the depth of the reverberations, the slowness, all of this reflects the music I dream of listening to, and so I create it in the hope that others will enjoy immersing themselves in it too...

OFFICIAL RELEASE: SEPTEMBER 5 BANDCAMP AND ALL DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Is any music possible at any time?

 

(“Colori” Giuseppe Chiari - 1974)

 

Is any music possible at any time?

Or does the era determine the type(s) of music that are possible?

Of course, there is the question of the instruments available at that time.

There is also the determination of the places and social circumstances where music is composed and performed.

But I also wonder whether the “spirit of the times,” the political context, the dominant intellectual paradigms, social conflicts, and new advances in science and cosmology may have had an influence on the music that was conceivable, listenable, in short, possible at a given time and place.

In other words, did Copernicus or Newton have an impact on the music of their time? Did Einstein's theory of relativity, the atom, cybernetics, and quantum physics influence musical creation?

And what about the humanities? Did the Encyclopedism of the Enlightenment, German altertumwissenschatf, Freudian psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, semiotics, and surrealism find their way into the history of music?

In other words, are we free of the parameters of our musical creation today, or are we unknowingly determined by the dominant paradigms of our time?

What is music?

 

I know I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to ask myself these questions...

 

What is music?

 

Is it a form of architecture?

 

Is it a form of painting?

 

Is it a form of sculpture?

 

Is it a form of writing?

 

Is it poetry?

 

Is it philosophy?

 

Is it cosmology?

 

Is it mathematics?

 

Is it geometry? 

 

The music I listen to, the music I create, solo or in collaboration, builds, organizes, maps possible worlds...

 

They largely escape analytical language, words, definitions...

 

These worlds are mirrors, but of what exactly?

 

Mirrors of a life, a thought, an unconscious?

 

The main power of the music I listen to, that I love, that I create, is its power of abstraction.

 

It pulls me away from where I am, from my space-time, and takes me to another place.

 

Music traces paths to other places...

 

Music exists at the crossroad of time and space. 

 

The musician is at the center of this universe.

 

The listener too. 

MUSIC TO LISTEN TO WITH EYES CLOSED (REVIEW)

 

Nice review in Audion 83....

 

And by the way, this album is "NAME YOUR PRICE" on my Bandcamp page!

 

Will you fall asleep while listening to it with closed eyes?

 

Please try and tell me! :-))

 

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/.../music-to-listen...

SUMMER PROMO / 20% DISCOUNT ON LIGHTWAVE AND CHRISTIAN WITTMAN RELEASES!

 

Link 

 Code: audion83

valid until August 31 

 

 

Link 

 Code: audion83

valid until August 31 

 

16 QUESTIONS WITH CHRISTIAN WITTMAN

 

 

 

A six pages long interview in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025, just released! 

 

AUDION 83 - PRINTED MAGAZINE & PDF editions

 

 

 

Link to Ultima Thule Records 

 

Link to Audion 83 Printed magazine 

 

Link to Audion 83 on Ebay 

 

Link to Audion 83 Multimedia Edition  

  

Audio exclusives: 

Lightwave - Ganymede 6:24 - unreleased recording 

Christian Wittman - Starry Night 6:09 - unreleased recording 

 

  

 

 

HASLINGER - WITTMAN. MALLARME (work in progress)

 

First published in May 1897, Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard occupies a singular place in the history of European literature. By applying non-linear principles to the construction of language, Mallarmé creates a seemingly chaotic yet meticulously orchestrated topography of meaning—transforming the poem into a labyrinth of signs, where reading becomes both constrained and expansive.

This radical gesture, rooted in the subversion of normative literary conventions and in the quest of "l'art pour l'art", is amplified by the dismantling of poetic syntax, narrative linearity, and fixed meaning—a rupture that redefines the very act of reading.

It is this spirit of spatial and semantic disruption that inspired the musical project by Paul Haslinger and Christian Wittman. Drawing on the temporal elasticity and multidimensionality of listening, they explore the fleeting nature of sonic perception.

Fluid and organically evolving, Mallarmé unfolds across three movements. Interweaving minimalism and experimentation, impressionism and abstraction, the work invites the listener into a realm of tonal poetry—a world of sound in perpetual reflection.

VIEWS OF MIND

 

My new album will be available for pre-order on the Shimmering Moods label website from July 12.

 

LINK

Available on CD (limited edition) and digital.

  

“Views of Mind” continues my recent trend towards ambient chamber music, blending electronic soundscapes with acoustic instruments, and moving towards a kind of contemporary classical music.

Through its minimalism, this new album is introspective, unwinding the threads of a slow, fluid, serene and meditative musical reverie.

Like a sonic screen on which to project intimate films, “Views of Mind” encourages contemplative listening, away from the tumult of the world...

Morton Feldman

 

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…

REVIEW OF "AKOUSMATA" in AUDION MAGAZINE (82, june 2025, po. 39)

 

 

BANDCAMP LINK

BRIAN ENO & BEATIE WOLFE - Luminal / Lateral (Verve)

 

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... 

LISTEN TO MY MUSIC IN HD / LOSSLESS FOR FREE!

 Dear visitors to my blog,

It seems that more and more of you are visiting my blog, and I thank you for that!

If you'd like to discover my music other than through streaming platforms, I'm offering four albums on Bandcamp with the “Name your price” option, i.e. potentially for free.

This is your chance to listen to my music in high definition and in the lossless format of your choice.

And if you'd like to show your support for an independent musician, I'm offering my entire discography (69 albums!) at an 80% discount!

 

LINK

 

 

 

LINK 

 

 

LINK 

 

 

LINK 

 

 

The Revenant: A haunting soundtrack...

 

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...

From Image to Music...

 

 

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?

Pink Floyd at Pompeii

 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...

4'33"

 

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!

About "Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed" — Zen and Music?

 

In a few words, I'd like to explain the project behind my new album.

For some time now, my music has been trying to achieve a certain minimalism, leaving its place to silence, slowness and a form of “controlled randomness”, playing with shifts and superimpositions of motifs in a certain indeterminacy. 

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...

                                                 (Snapshot of my current playlist at home...)

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!

Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed

   

 

 •• 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

Ad Astra

 About Ad Astra, film by James Gray, 2019, starring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones...

Soundtrack: Max Richter

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...

MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY

 

 

 (“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 .

 

 

 

 

 

DO I CREATE MY MUSIC?

 

Or does the music create and recreate me?

 

Why, over a given period of time, does the music I compose and record follow the same aesthetic, progress along the same path, as if to deepen and perfect an idea, a concept, a project, a set of physical, mental and imaginary sensations translated into constructed sounds, into a sonic temporality?

 

The same applies to musical composition as to any creative process: painting, sculpture, writing, video, cinema, photography. The artifact created reflects the creator, at a given time and place, what he or she feels, his or her state of mind, his or her experience.

 

In fact, I believe this is what will always distinguish human creation from creation by artificial intelligence: the latter has no experience and no state of mind. At least not yet.

 

The music I'm creating at the moment is a quest for slowness and fluidity, almost organic, almost biological and cellular. Sounds stretch, hybridize, meet and collide.

 

I set to music the mathematical theory of percolation, which models the diffusion of ideas, viruses, language games and tics, representations and models in a society.

 

It's all bounces, echoes, forks and splits, like a kind of billiard table or pinball machine where the trajectory of sounds is unpredictable and random, yet obeys a profound logic and necessity, that of the life of sounds, which are born, move and fade away.

 

I love this moment in my musical journey, when I play with silence and time, with concept and chance. It's fascinating to work with sounds, to assemble and construct them in an architecture where space and time are so closely intertwined.

 

There comes a time when a writer, painter, filmmaker or sculptor finds his or her own voice. I don't pretend to compare myself to the immense creators who have made our world more beautiful, our lives more bearable, through their visions, their language, the audacity of their proposals.

 

No, I have no such pretension.

 

But I do have the impression, in the course of my musical work and my album releases, that I'm gradually building a world, a possible world, a world of my own, a cosmology and an ontology that puts sounds in order, in the space-time of a listening session.

 

I don't care if I'm not commercial, if I don't bend to the standards of Spotify playlists and the like.

 

I make MY music. Music that reflects ME, that sounds like ME. Music that accompanies ME on my creative and existential quest.

And if you want to listen to my music, please feel free to visit my bandcamp page or all the usual streaming / downloads sites...

 

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/

THE VISUAL REMIXES AND SAMPLING OF ZOË HEATH

 

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:  

LINK

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!

ABOUT KLAUS SCHULZE

 

I'm coming back to Klaus Schulze.

 

I'm listening to his discography again... He was one of the people who led me to make music myself...

 

I also went to many of his Paris concerts, between the late 70s and the 90s.

 

And I met him several times, in Paris or at his studio in Germany.

 

I've been in close contact with his manager/publisher, Klaus Mueller. 

 

And I think there's a text by me in the booklet of one of the “special editions” of his complete works, the historic one, perhaps - under the signature of ‘Séji’, I think.

 

I would like to say that I have immense respect for the man. He was an inventor, a pioneer. A real one.

 

Since Irrlicht, Cyborg, Black Dance, Time Wind, he has never ceased to open up new, experimental, exploratory avenues. Some of Schulze's later albums, even his most recent ones, may seem to capitalize on this legacy.

 

But Schulze's music has always had a sound, a style recognizable among a thousand...

 

Without being controversial, someone like Jean-Michel Jarre didn't invent anything. He had other talents, such as marketing and staging mega-concerts financed by public and private sponsors. But his music hasn't had the directing force of a Klaus Schulze, a Tangerine Dream or a Kraftwerk, or even a Brian Eno.

 

Along with Tangerine Dream, Schulze was one of those who brought this music to the concert stage, when it could have remained a studio creation. He was accompanied by Harald Grosskopf, Manuel Göttsching, Arthur Brown, Rainer Bloss, Lisa Gerrard, and perhaps Wolfgang Tiepold on cello (I'm not sure if he played live with Schulze). But for the most part, it was Klaus Schulze at the helm, with his modular moog, organ, minimogs, polymoog, VCS3, then the GDS computer and the new Midi lutheries (Alesis and others).

 

The memory I retain of these concerts is that of this white silhouette, sitting on the floor in front of his black wall of modular synths, launching his sequences, coating his polyphonies, and immersing himself in his minimoog solos, the solos of a whirling dervish, lost in tangled oriental loops.

 

Schulze's concerts were an immersive, hypnotic experience of life.

Schulze's recorded music offers a purer, more controlled, more intellectualized version of this experience.

 

But duration is always a given.

 

Unless I'm mistaken, Klaus Schulze has seldom recorded short pieces.

 

He would have been blackballed by the little bastards who lock Spotify playlists these days, and exclude without warning anything longer than four minutes and with an ounce of experimentation - you don't want to wake listeners up from a playlist “to sleep on”, do you...

 

Schulze taught me a lot about the temporality of a composition. He invited me to reflect on its linearity, its ruptures. He taught me about its architecture - a bass line, the polyphony that carries it, the rise of a first sequence, then a second sequence that acts as counterpoint, and electronic effects that cross the stereophonic spectrum, like spices that add the “final touch” to a cooked dish.

 

I loved Klaus Schulze, too, for his hybridization of certain classical references, Wagner, Mahler. And for the genius with which he constructed some of his most abstract compositions - Mirage, Dune, X...

 

For me, one of the summits of Schulzian art is “Sebastian im Traum” in Audentity... It's an absolute masterpiece, in its abstraction, its unfolding, its leit motives...

 

I don't think anything has ever equalled for me the experience of listening to “Sebastian im Traum”. This piece took me very far, very deeply inside myself...

 

I could write pages and pages about what Klaus Schulze has meant to me, about his inspiration, about what he has allowed me to imagine and think, and finally, about his driving role in my decision to make electronic music myself...

 

I don't know how to express all that I owe him...