Saturday, October 18, 2025

CHANCE

John Cage during his 1966 concert at the opening of the National Arts Foundation in Washington, D.C.

 

"Most people who believe that I'm interested in chance don't realize that I use chance as a discipline — they think I use it — I don't know — as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist in choosing what questions to ask...

If I ask the I Ching a question as though it were a book of wisdom, which it is,  I generally say, "What do you have to say about this?" and then I just listen to what it says and see if some bells ring or not"

 

John Cage, quoted by Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats. John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, The Penguin Press, 2012, p. 213. 

Sunday, October 12, 2025

LOOKING TO COLLABORATE WITH EXPERIMENTAL FILMAKERS ON ATMOSPHERIC, SOUND-DRIVEN WORKS.


I’m looking to connect with filmmakers or visual and video artists creating experimental or conceptual short films — works that challenge form and perception. My aim is to create immersive audiovisual pieces where sound and image interact as equal elements, shaping mood and meaning together.
 
This is a creative and non-commercial initiative, focused on exploration, dialogue, and artistic process. 
 
If your visual practice moves through atmosphere, concept, abstraction, or emotional resonance, I’d love to hear from you. 
 
contact: DM or mail: wittman.christian [@] gmail.com
 
some links to my recent albums: 
 

THE SOUND CHARTS OF JOHN CAGE

John Cage "Music of Changes" Manuscript Fragment 

Courtesy the John Cage Trust

 "Until that time, my music had been based on the traditional idea that you had to say something. The charts gave me my first indication of the possibility of saying nothing"

John Cage 

 

"(These elaborate sound charts) resemble checkerboards laid out with combinations of sounds. In composing, Cage makes "moves" by drawing lines — diagonals, horizontals, verticals — on the chart to determine which sound comes next" 

 

Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Penguin Books, 2013, p. 168.

THREE TRACKS INCLUDED IN THE "DESCENDING DUSK" PROGRAM OF HEARTS OF SPACE!

 


 Link

Saturday, October 11, 2025

MUSIC AND SELF-EXPRESSION: ARE WE IN A TOWER OF BABEL?

John Cage (1988)

"The need to change my music was evident to me earlier in my life. I had been taught, as most people are, that music is in effect the expression of an individual's ego — "self-expression" is what I have been taught. But then, when I saw that everyone was expressing himself differently and using a different way of composing, I deduced that we were in a Tower of Babel situation because no one was understanding anybody else; for instance, I wrote a sad piece and people hearing it laughed. It was clearly pointless to continue in that way, so I determined to stop writing music until I found a better reason than "self-expression" for it"

 John Cage, quoted in: Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Penguin Books, 2013, p. 119-120 

Friday, October 10, 2025

Q & A. COLLABORATION WITH PAUL HASLINGER?

  

One last question about Paul Haslinger: how did you meet him and what was your collaboration like? It seems that you currently have a project with him?

We met Paul in March 1986 during the two Tangerine Dream concerts at the Olympia, organized by Serge Leroy. Paul returned to Paris a few days later, and we met him again thanks to mutual friends. We had the opportunity to play him  Cités analogues  and discuss our musical activities. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that has lasted for decades, as it continues to this day. Our collaboration took many forms: we played two concerts together (in Paris and London), and Paul participated in five of our albums, either for occasional edits on our mixes or for direct creative input on certain tracks. It is thanks to Paul that we were sponsored by Atari at one point and signed by Hearts of Space/Fathom. Paul also recorded Jon Hassell's contribution to one of the tracks on Bleue comme une orange in his studio in Los Angeles. Paul has given us so much, both technically and artistically, and we have wonderful memories of rehearsals and composing in the studio, as well as the two concerts we gave together, not to mention the convivial moments in Paris and Los Angeles... 



Studio session in Paris in 2002 for the Lightwave album "Bleue comme une orange"

We had been discussing a reboot of our musical collaboration for some time. I took the initiative to get things going again in April of this year, and we started working remotely, exchanging audio tracks. Almost immediately, we found a common musical language, both minimalist and sophisticated, combining our expertise and personalities, and exploring directions that we had both ventured into. A first track emerged, then a second and a third, which Paul refined and improved in successive mixes, and whose direction we consolidated through exchanges of feedback and ideas.

 

Draft cover of the forthcoming album (SOOND label)


We named this album Mallarmé, in reference to the famous 19th-century poet who paved the way for modern poetry through his creative deconstruction of the French language and the typographical space of the handwritten and printed page. The three long pieces on the album are based on slowness, space, and the gradual metamorphosis of sounds and textures. Mallarmé is a project that opens up a listening space that is both minimalist and abstract, ambient yet quite contemporary. IMHO, its is a very beautiful album…  

Our album will be released by SOOND in the first quarter of 2026 (CD and digital), a label specializing in classical, contemporary, and electroacoustic music, from Johannes Brahms to Philip Glass, from Gesualdo to Bruno Letort.

We have also agreed with Paul to continue this collaboration, in a format different from Lightwave, but which may involve Christoph Harbonnier in future projects, recordings, and live performances.

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

Q & A. ABOUT THE MAJOR CHALLENGES FOR AN INDEPENDENT MUSICIAN IN 2025

 

What do you see as the major challenges for an independent, non-commercial musician in 2025?

These challenges are immense. However, you have to overcome the discouragement that often threatens to stop you from continuing, when musical creation is part of who you are, of your life. I think many people will recognize themselves in my experience... Not being backed by a major record label or a publishing or management agency leaves us a little helpless in today's musical jungle. I'm just stating the obvious, but the democratization of access to music production (which is a good thing in itself) leads to a continuous flood of new albums, in the most popular genres as well as in niche genres such as ambient. How can you stay afloat among the tens of thousands of new tracks poured onto streaming and download platforms every day? This is the realm of algorithms, which operate on self-fulfilling prophecies: a musician who does not exceed a certain threshold of streams will never be featured on editorialized playlists, quod erat demonstrandum! Added to this are the challenges of music generated by artificial intelligence, uploaded in droves by rogue companies. This system crushes independent and non-mainstream musicians, remuneration rates are ridiculously low, and the vast majority of tracks put on platforms earn no income at all. Earning a few dozen euros a year, I consider myself one of the happy few.


Except for the most established musicians, Spotify is a machine that erases differences and produces uniform, anonymous playlists, with nothing that stands out. The coherence of albums and the very identity of musicians disappear into a continuum that serve as a backdrop for sleeping, napping, studying, reading, running, doing anything and everything. Utility music, calibrated to be heard without being listened to, formatted into tracks of three or four minutes maximum because beyond that, attention wanders, doesn't it? I have never managed to break into this algorithmic ecosystem, and after investing significant sums in platforms that serve as interfaces with playlist curators, where you have to pay between $2 and $3 just to have your track listened to, and more often than not rejected, I gave up. I think I'm past the age of being lectured by the little ayatollahs of streaming who reject my music because it's too abstract, not melodic enough, they don't like the piano, it needs more bass, your music is creepy, we're looking for up-tempo, it needs vocals, etc. LOL

                                  My Spotify dashboard


So much for the dystopian side of things. But it's not all doom and gloom. Even with fairly low streaming statistics, platforms provide global visibility, and every listen, every addition to a personal playlist, whether in Japan, Brazil, or Denmark, is a way to expand your network and reach new listeners. Bandcamp remains a great platform for musicians and independent labels, allowing them to build their discography, measure their audience, and earn decent compensation for their music....




There are also a host of small independent labels, often only existing on Bandcamp, which are niche and specialized, managed by enthusiasts, often musicians themselves, offering limited edition CDs, vinyls, or cassettes, often with beautiful artwork and sometimes original, high-end packaging that makes the CD a collector's item. I have had the opportunity to have my music published on some of them: Disco Gecko, Cyclical Dreams, Shimmering Moods, Slow Tone Collages, Whitelabrecs, Driftworks. Each label has its own audience, loyalized by newsletters, and while most of them do not provide financial returns, they do shine a spotlight on the musician and help expanding their audience. It should be noted that musicians grant a temporary license, retain the rights to their music, and can generally republish these albums on their own Bandcamp page and platforms a few weeks later. This is an alternative micro-economic model, where these small net-labels can have a very high-end artistic policy and self-finance in order to, ultimately, do promotional and public relations work for the benefit of their artists.

Another positive element is the multiple relays of podcasts, radio shows, blogs, and webzines, which act as echo chambers, delayed, localized, or broad, for independent musicians. Each of these outlets has its own audience and its own musical filters, and often features mediators with in-depth, long-term knowledge of the evolution of electronic music—Audion magazine, among others, is a remarkable example of this.

So, to sum up... The current music ecosystem forces independent musicians to be versatile. Music creation is only part of their job. They also have to manage their own press relations, maintain their presence on social media, promote themselves, build a personal brand, and try to stay afloat in a world where everything is fast-moving, from newsfeeds to playlists and podcasts: it's a constant struggle to stay on the radar...

Being an independent musician today therefore involves making fundamental choices, which have as much to do with career strategies as with artistic projects and personality. For my part, I have never sought to follow the trends of the moment, especially the very specific stylistic criteria of the dominant ambient playlists. I also think that the term “ambient” has lost much of its meaning today and now covers what used to be called “new age”—nothing pejorative in itself, but it's not the music I listen to or create. I think it's important to stick to a clear and readable roadmap, to a consistency that is ultimately a guarantee of human and artistic authenticity and integrity. Musicians such as Steve Roach, Robert Rich, Ian Boddy, and Tangerine Dream, in its successive lineups, have had this merit and have built long careers on this consistency. Lightwave's journey has been more confidential because our music was undoubtedly more difficult, situated at the crossroads of different genres, and therefore intended to a smaller audience. As for me, my solo journey is relatively recent, and I have only been able to rely partially on Lightwave's reputation, which I believe is totally unknown to the younger generation and the vast majority of the ambient audience.

 

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi. 

 

Q & A. ANY NEW MUSICAL DIRECTION IN THE FUTURE?

 

John Adams. Nixon in China. Le couple Nixon, invité en Chine en 1972, ici mis en scène par Valentina Carrasco. Opéra National de Paris (2023)


Are there any musical directions that you can see yourself going in the future that may surprise your listeners? 

I don't think I'll ever do techno, metal, or even progressive rock... Bossa nova is also unlikely, although I enjoy very much this kind of music. However, since the days of our albums In Der Unterwelt, Cantus Umbrarum, and Lowell with Lightwave, I've been thinking about what an electronic opera might be like—I should point out that I'm a big fan of opera, and I've enjoyed certain operas by Peter Eötvös, Pascal Dusapin, and Helmut Lachenmann at the Paris Opera. This season, we are lucky enough to have Philip Glass's Satyagraha and John Adams's Nixon in China, which are more classically orchestrated. So yes, working towards an electronic opera, with sampled voices and real singers and reciters, would be wonderful... not to mention the possibility of a live performance...  

 

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi. 

 

Sunday, October 5, 2025

Q & A. MY VOYAGES INTO MUSICAL EXPLORATION

 

John Cage Score without Parts (40 Drawings by Thoreau)- Twelve Haiku, 1978 

 

A lot of your recent albums have had concepts and are very much voyages into musical exploration—please elaborate on what it is that you are trying to achieve.

As an independent musician in a narrow musical niche, that of atmospheric and experimental ambient music, and not being in a position where I have to make a living from my albums, I have total creative freedom. I release an album when I want to, with music that matches my personality and my artistic vision, without making compromises or concessions to meet the expectations of a supposed wider audience or the mainstream standards of the moment. This freedom is a privilege that allows me to pursue a path marked by experimentation, abstraction, and a form of ongoing quest. 

You may know that in my “real life,” I am a researcher in the humanities and social sciences, and I have had a successful academic career in France, between Classics, history, and anthropology, with a dozen or so books published. So I am quite an intellectual and conceptual person, lol, and my deep vocation for research has manifested itself in two forms, in my work as a university professor and in my musical activity. The languages, the means of expression, and the audiences are obviously different, but ultimately I think they are quite similar forms of creativity and mental functioning. So, it's true that I approach music in a fairly intellectualized way, as we've seen with Lightwave's concept albums, but this also applies to my solo music: there are constant references to cartography, geometry, contemporary painting and sculpture, but also to meditation and spirituality, particularly Buddhism. I am fascinated by sound and silence, by slowness, by immersive atmospheres, by successive thresholds of listening and consciousness, by forms of writing and poetry that do not use the language of words, but that of sounds, vibrations, and harmonics.

So this exploratory dimension is essential to me. It has manifested itself in some of my space music albums, traversing vast stellar expanses, as well as in my music designed for sound installations or art galleries, where sound would configure new relationships to space, to the position of the body in that space, and to forms of sensory disorientation.



I must admit that Brian Eno has been and still is a major influence on me since the release of his first ambient albums, Discreet Music, Music for Airports, Thursday Afternoon, etc. Research and experimentation are at the heart of Brian Eno's entire career, whether in music, visual arts, installations, or his work as a producer, for example for U2. I have a copy of his Oblique Strategies card game at home, which I sometimes use as a creativity trigger or to reorient a recording session in a different direction.

More recently, I have begun to deepen my knowledge of the compositional methods of a number of “minimalist” musicians such as John Cage and Morton Feldman, which has led me to think of my music as a set of visual devices or sculptures in motion, trying to translate variations in light, color, form, and space into sound. I am also fascinated by the interaction between chance and structure.

Morton Feldman. Score for "Projections" series

 
Paradoxically, despite this intellectualized dimension, I think I approach music more as a “tinkerer” (un bricoleur) than as an “engineer,” to borrow the distinction made by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. That is to say, I like to divert, experiment, and engage in montages and experiments that deviate from expected forms and models. In a largely intuitive and exploratory way, I also feel that I move freely within the possibilities of contemporary music, hybridizing influences, subverting genres and classifications, and perhaps appropriating with my own musical language what dodecaphonic, serial, atonal, concrete, electroacoustic, and minimalist music have explored since the beginning of the 20th century. Years of listening to music have allowed me to create my own synthesis of these different currents.

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi. 

 

Friday, October 3, 2025

Q & A. CURRENT EQUIPMENT?





What equipment do you currently play and why? 

As I mentioned earlier, my studio today consists exclusively of virtual instruments. Over time, I have invested significant amounts of money to assemble a set of highly complementary tools, selectively drawing from the catalogs of the major companies that dominate this market, such as Native Instruments, Arturia, Spitfire Audio, UVI, Orchestral Tools and a few others. To these essential instruments, I have added more specialized and experimental synthesizers, such as Vital, Loom, Synplant, Myth, Novum, and others. I have also selected granular processing instruments that allow me to radically transform audio files and some of my recorded tracks, and I have acquired the entire Metasynth environment for its sound design potential.  Finally, I acquired an MPE keyboard (Midi Polyphonic Expression), which opened up fascinating musical possibilities, less for emulating acoustic instruments (guitar, violin, etc.) than for the new expressiveness it allows with purely electronic sounds and the possibility of creating complex and evolving textures, where the tactile and gestural dimension plays an important role. For the most abstract and atmospheric passages of my music, I use a Roli Seaboard 2 keyboard in a very intuitive way, focusing on textures rather than the notes themselves. While a classic MIDI keyboard produces a musical typography, an MPE keyboard allows you to create a kind of sound calligraphy, full of curves, sinuosities, flourishes, and arabesques.


I follow the commercial offerings in terms of VSTs and plugins with attention and interest, while remaining very selective. I don't think I'm the target audience for many instruments, which are sometimes backed by somewhat tiresome marketing campaigns geared towards dance, techno, or cinematic music. I often pay attention to the creations of independent developpers who design experimental tools, particularly for sound processing. For some of the more complex synths I use, I also buy ad hoc sound banks created by musician-programmers whom I have come to know and respect... 

 

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi. 

 

Q & A. INTENTION OF PLAYING LIVE?

 Soundcheck. Concert at Bussum (2001)

 

 To date, have you played or do you have any intention of playing live and what, if any, problems would this present to you?

No, to date, I have not given any solo concerts. The last concert I played was with Christoph, a Lightwave concert at the B Wave festival in Belgium (2016). As for my solo work, the opportunity hasn't presented itself yet, but to be honest, I haven't sought it out either. I think of myself more as a studio musician, producing music that is meant to be listened to in optimal conditions, preferably with hi-fi equipment.  My music is contemplative and meditative, slowly evolving, without any real rhythmic or melodic reference points. It's immersive soundscapes. What's more, I can no longer play on the spectacular aspect of a pile of instruments and modular synths on stage, as I did with Lightwave in its heyday. In fact, my setup could be reduced to a MIDI keyboard and a laptop, or even one of those new boxes that allow you to mix and modify audio files or loops that have been loaded in advance. But visually, in itself, it's not very exciting. This austerity would have to be compensated for by a sophisticated light show or video projections.  I imagine other forms of performance instead. For example, sound installations and live mixes in an art gallery, a historic site (cloister? abbey, church???), a garden, a museum, or a natural site. Or music for contemporary ballet. Or a soundtrack for an experimental film.... 

 

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi. 

 

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Q & A. ABOUT THE COMPOSITIONAL PROCESS

 


Do you have a particular compositional process that is a starting point for each album or do you approach each one differently? 

My compositional method is a form of controlled improvisation. At the start of a recording session, I choose one of my favorite instruments and browse through its sound bank, usually without any preconceived ideas. The starting point for the first track will therefore be the inspiration I get from a preset, the intuition of its creative potential here and now. I record a first track, choosing a particular key and a set of rules, for example in terms of rhythm, repetition, melodic pattern, or something else. On this first layer, I choose a new instrument or different sounds from the same instrument to start recording a second track. The complementarity of sounds and textures is essential here. Then I do the same again for a third track, a fourth, and so on. In this overdubbing process, I ultimately reproduce what we used to do in Lightwave in our studio sessions or concerts, where everyone played while listening to the others, trying to provide a counterpoint, a complement, a punctuation, and sometimes also introducing a climatic change to move the piece forward. Playing in a group taught me to think about the big picture rather than my personal contribution, so it was the opposite of filling in or ego-driven one-upmanship. In fact, very often, when listening back to a Lightwave recording, Christoph and I were, and sometimes still are, unable to tell who did what: the result was coherent, organic, and structured music, and not the juxtaposition of disparate tracks. So it's a bit the same principle that I apply to the multitrack recording process of my solo music. Each track must make sense, bring something to the previous ones: it must emphasize, complement, but not confuse or disrupt. It must have a purpose and meaning, and not be a gratuitous addition.



When we recorded live, on Revox or DAT, this co-composition work had to be done in the moment. An untimely sound or phrase would ruin the entire recording: we had to start all over again, with no guarantee of recapturing the same feeling. Cités analogues and Nachtmusik were recorded under these conditions, which is why they are so magical. When we were able to equip ourselves with the wonderful Alesis ADAT multi-track digital recorders, we each had our own stereo tracks, sometimes for each keyboard, so it was possible to make corrections afterwards.

Today, a DAW offers this flexibility, both for a band and for a solo musician. This is why, after recording the basic tracks, the editing stage follows, which is in fact the composition stage itself, where the different parts come together to form a coherent whole. I listen to what I have recorded several times, I make a first mix, and I delete, aerate, and declutter the tracks, one after the other. This stage allows the music to “breathe,” weaving sounds into silence, giving them depth and space. It's a very intuitive process. I listen with an open mind and know that I need to delete this note or pattern at this moment. It's a split-second decision, and when I listen back, I almost never restore what I've deleted. There's another aspect to this editing work: its visual dimension. The arrangement window allows me to see the topography of the MIDI notes, instrument by instrument, on the layered tracks. It's like a map, but also a form of abstract art, where the spatial distribution of notes creates visual rhythms, geometric patterns, and labyrinthine intertwining. The final composition is the result of this micro-work of spatialized calligraphy in the DAW's arrangement window.


Next comes the fine tuning of levels, effects, spatialization, and sometimes modifying the tempo of the piece to slow it down and create completely different atmospheres, through time stretching, which completely reconfigures the composition and its harmonic landscapes.

When the mix seems stable, I export the audio file and let it rest for a while before listening to it again the next day. At this stage, I often go back to the multitrack recording to correct levels, rebalance the mix, calibrate differently effects, or, in some cases, further refine the instrumental tracks.

 

Originally published in AUDION MAGAZINE #83, August 2025.

Interview by Andy Garibaldi.