Q & A. ABOUT LIGHTWAVE "CONCEPT ALBUMS"

 

Several of Lightwave studio albums are inspired by particular subjects around which the tracks revolve—please tell us more about the compositional nature of these albums. 

Choosing a concept, album title, and song titles is an important moment in our creative path. This step usually came at a time when we already had a certain amount of material recorded: we had to make a selection, think about the sequence of tracks, in short, build an artistic project. The concept helped us in this editorial process. We followed different threads.  Tycho Brahe,  Mundus Subterraneus,  and  Lowell  are albums inspired by figures who were both important and somewhat marginal in the history of science, and they allowed us to escape certain clichés of space music or dark ambient. 

 

 In the same vein,  Bleue comme une orange  is a reference to the French poet Paul Eluard and led us to explore the world of colors, while  Caryotype was inspired by the completion of the human genome map and connected us to the most contemporary science.  Each of the titles of our albums (and our tracks) therefore plays an important role in building the atmosphere of our music and its identity, and the concept naturally inspires the artwork, which is the visual gateway to the album. This was the heyday of Lightwave, when we were lucky enough to see our music released on CD on Fathom/Hearts of Space, then on Radio France's Signatures label, with international distribution. We also had a publishing contract with Métisse Music, which gave us some visibility on radio and supported us in our most ambitious concert projects, in Oberhausen and in the Choranche caves in the Vercors massif.

An amusing detail: I discovered by chance that a track from Mundus Subterraneus, De Motu Pendulorum, had been sampled, or rather used in its entirety as a background layer, on the album Boniche Dub by Bill Laswell and Lili Boniche (1998) (link to the track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2QflrNImEk&ab_channel=SalmaDahab). Obviously, we weren't contacted and weren't asked for permission! And of course, we were not credited! We were flattered that Bill Laswell had spotted our music, but rather than asking him for damages, we would have liked him to give our career a little boost... We would have had to take legal action to assert our rights, but we were dissuaded from doing so because of the likely costs involved...

 

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi.