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.