[REVIEW] FLOATING INDETERMINATION (FOR MORTON FELDMAN)

 Review by Alan Freeman, Audion 86, February 2026, p. 32.

 

[REVIEW] THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

 

Review by Andy Garibaldi, Audion 86, February 2026, p. 43.

  

THE QUEST OF A MUSICAL PHILOSOPHER'S STONE?

 

I am currently testing GRM Tools (better late than never...). After the IRCAM plugins, I am exploring the infinite transformations and hybridizations of my own recordings in unexpected and exciting directions.

I like the idea of working with sound material in a chain of processing and remodeling, which sculpts its form, volume, motor skills, temporality, and space.

 

These tools can be used with an in-depth knowledge of sound physics. 

 

I prefer to approach them more intuitively, a bit like a painter working with colors or a sculptor working with raw stone or wood.

 

That's how I compose my music.

 

But once the tracks are recorded and mixed, they become the starting point for new sound experiments.

 

Years of practicing with hardware, analog, modular, and digital synthesizers, then virtual instruments, as well as years of listening to classical, contemporary, and electronic music, have trained a bit my ear.

 

By experimenting with today's new tools as a tinkerer rather than an engineer, I hope one day to hear the unheard and perhaps find the musical philosopher's stone that every musician dreams of!

WHEN A GREAT CREATOR DIES...

 

"When a great creator dies, history—including his own history—holds its breath, looks around, and wonders what to do, as if waiting for new directives or new insights that might suddenly shine through the opaque shell of habit. History waits to gather and summarize the significant episodes of creative power; it waits for a new autopsy of the organs and expressive organism of the great creator. Or it waits for a lazy and unexpected silence to be broken.

 

When, moreover, the great creator who dies has recently crossed the border into a new territory rich in meaning, because it has been long and organically prepared, then we wonder, distraught, what else this man might have discovered and offered us if he had lived longer. (...)."

 

Luciano Berio (about Stravinsky)

 

This beautiful text reminds me of the musicians who have inspired me so much over the years, and whose creative work I would love to see continue forever....

 

To name but a few, I am thinking of Klaus Schulze, Hector Zazou, Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, Morton Feldman, John Cage and so many others who are gone ...

 

THE ARTIST'S TASK...

 

 

"The artist's task is not limited to finding solutions to existing problems, but rather—as the works prove—to constantly inventing new problems."

Luciano Berio — Electronic Music (in: Ecrits sur la Musique, Philharmonie de Paris, 2025, p. 284)

 

 

Reading Luciano Berio's writings on music is a fascinating experience... They are so insightful, both in their reflection on his work and in their more general theoretical propositions.... 

This definition of the musician's task is so relevant, both in terms of his creative process and its effects on listeners.

Yes, all creation, whether musical, pictorial, literary, or intellectual, is measured by the problems it creates, not those it solves...

To create is to think, using the tools of the intellect, the senses, the body, and the imagination...

 

MUSIC STREAMING

 

Luminate’s 2025 annual report highlights a paradox at the heart of the global music industry. While the volume of music available on streaming platforms has reached unprecedented levels, actual listening remains extremely concentrated.

By the end of 2025, 253 million tracks were available worldwide — an increase of nearly 38 million songs in one year, or 106,000 new uploads per day. At first glance, this growth suggests creativity and diversity, but the data tells a far less optimistic story.

Nearly half of all tracks (120.5 million) received fewer than ten streams in 2025. Overall, 73% of songs had fewer than 100 listens, and 88% failed to reach 1,000 streams annually. In practice, almost nine out of ten tracks have no real economic impact in the streaming ecosystem.

Listening is also highly concentrated. Just 0.2% of tracks accounted for almost half of all global streams, confirming that streaming strongly favors a tiny elite of songs and artists. While major record labels represent only a small share of releases, revenue remains heavily skewed toward a limited number of hits.

The report warns that this imbalance may worsen as AI-generated music accelerates the flood of new releases. As the number of tracks continues to grow faster than audience attention, the industry faces a critical question: can hundreds of millions of songs be fairly compensated when listening remains focused on a tiny minority?

Ultimately, the music market appears trapped in excessive growth, raising concerns not only about artist remuneration but also about the cultural value of music itself.

(summary of a post by Radio FG: link  )  

IRCAM LAB — TS 2

I'm starting to learn, play, experiment, and create soundscapes with IRCAM's TS software... The processing radically transforms my original audio track, creating a kind of very beautiful, immersive, minimalist drone that's very hypnotic and reminds me of Pauline Oliveiros, Stuart Dempster, Somei Satoh, and other composers... 

 It really is a window onto a new creative universe... It's probably not going to be a commercial hit, and it's unlikely to make it into the dance music or techno charts (but who knows? ), but it's definitely a direction I'd like to explore in the future... (I've acquired other IRCAM softwares, I'm at the beginning of the learning curve, it's exciting!).

[READING] BERIO ON THE IDEA OF MUSICAL THEATER

Opéra National de Paris. Pelléas et Mélisande – Elena Tsallagova (Mélisande), Stéphane Degout (Pelléas), Stage set up by Bob Wilson, 2012  © Charles duprat

 

"We are close to an idea of musical theater that is a theater of the mind and memory, perhaps a virtual theater, a theater that invites our attention to constantly oscillate between listening and looking and back again, a theater that constructively challenges those who watch and those who listen, that arouses the desire to listen with one's eyes and look with one's ears. Eyes that can listen to different things from the same perspective and ears that may see only one thing, but from different perspectives. In other words, we are thinking of a theater made intelligible not only by the things we see and hear, but also by the desire to penetrate, discover, and confuse the different times of sounds and images.

Seeing music. The need to seek a link between image and sound comes from far away, from an ancient synesthetic vision of the world. Exodus 20:18: “And all the people saw the thunder and lightning and the sound of the shofar.”

The link between light and sound, between light and speech, is common to almost all stories of origins, primordial events, myths, and world consciousness, and music often seems to become the most powerful intermediary between the eye and the ear, between the moving and extreme points of a space that must always be explored and questioned anew. A space that sometimes seems to lead us to the threshold of a mystery. A space that we also try, with the tools of theater, to explore and stubbornly secularize, but which, in fact, always contains an intangible and perhaps sacred core."

Luciano Berio, "Des sons et des images (1995)"
 

[RADIO] THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE ON HEARTS OF SPACE!

 

Many thanks to Stephen Hill and to Hearts of Space for including two tracks of "The Nortwhest Passage" in this week radio program! I feel very honored!

 

LINK

 

Link to my album: https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/.../the-northwest... (HD tracks)

and all streaming and download platforms!

DEEP SPACE

 

ARE THERE ANY HUMAN READERS OF MY BLOG? :-)

 

My blog gets a certain number of visits every day from different parts of the world: USA, Hong Kong, Singapour, China, Germany, India, Japan, Netherlands and even... France!

But I wonder... Are these bots that scrape all the content on the web to train generative AI platforms?

Are there any human readers?

If you are human and you read (and enjoy) my blog, feel free to leave a comment from time to time!

(even though I know that AI platforms can probably do that too!)

[REVIEW] ANDROMEDA

 Thank you so much Rodrigo Passannanti! Despite the proliferation of AI-generated music flooding streaming platforms, despite biased and cynical algorithms that render so many musicians invisible, despite the mainstream music ecosystem cannibalizing independent artists... there are still ways to share music and reach new listeners, through unconventional channels, between enthusiasts with curious and open ears...

MUSIC IN THE CELLAR

Is music like a fine wine that needs to be left to mature and age in a cellar before being consumed?

The “draft” section of my Bandcamp page is a bit like that cellar, where I organize my music by album projects, letting my compositions rest and withstand the test of multiple listens before crossing the threshold of publication...

It's also a kind of personal journal, where I archive moments of life and creativity that can span several months.

But there's also another reason, inherent to the type of music I compose. It's not written in the traditional sense, meaning I can't archive sheet music. The archive is the recording itself, the stereo tracks resulting from the final mix. I also keep an archive of all the recording sessions on my DAW, the stems of the different tracks, with the presets of the instruments and processes used and the mixing settings. This allows me to revisit and correct a recording months after the original session.

On the other hand, in electronic, ambient, or electroacoustic music, there is the central element of timbres and processes for spatialization and sound transformation. While melodic and harmonic elements can be notated using traditional musical notation, they are not the most important aspects of the music I create: the very nature of the sounds, their morphology, their movement in space, and their hybridization in the mix are the basis of my compositions. 

There are undoubtedly notation and visualization systems that could capture the specificities of electronic music, but to what extent can the singularity of the sounds that make up the compositions be reproduced, and to what extent can a score of this type be played by other performers?

Some electronic music, predominantly melodic, can be written and performed by other musicians or even adapted for acoustic instrumentalists: Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis come to mind in particular. But I find it difficult to conclude that electronic works can become “repertoire works.” A special case is when the composer or group reinterprets their works in concert, with a greater or lesser degree of fidelity to the original work. Backing tapes and computer playback can preserve the essence of the original work. Kraftwerk and Jarre today, but also Tangerine Dream, rely on these devices, which can also take the form of control over pre-programmed loops and sequences triggered live.

But to return to my question, how can music based on drones, atonal layers, and movements in binaural space be visualized on a score?

 

[REVIEW] ANDROMEDA / SIDE-LINE MAGAZINE

 

 

 

LINK 

NINA STUDIO

 

By popular request, here's why my music production studio is called “Nina Studio”...

 

I have a very zen artistic assistant with an incredible ear for music.

She's a bit like the muse of my studio. As long as she stays on my keyboard, I know that everything is fine and that she likes what I'm composing. 

 

If she stretches and goes to sit somewhere else, I know there's a problem and that I can do better...

 

In fact, Nina plays a very important role in my music... She sets the mood, the feeling, and the tempo of my recording sessions...

 

And when she purrs, it's a signal that I need to add sub-bass to the track I'm working on...

 

I can tell from the movements of her ears what catches her attention, what leaves her indifferent, what she doesn't like.

 

Every time I sit down at the keyboard, open my virtual instruments, or launch my DAW, Nina is there, front and center...

 

She is the first listener of my mixes, and she lets me know if I need to do a second mix or if I should just give up on the track I'm working on...

 

I think that one of these days, Nina will sit down at the keyboard and record her own solo album, ambient purring embellished here and there with a little harmonic meow...

 

The real artist in Christian Wittman's musical productions is not me, it's Nina.

 

I predict a great career for her as a producer, not only in ambient and contemporary music, but also in the meow meow scene.

 

If you want to evaluate her role as producer, sound engineer, artistic director, creative assistant, press officer (and so on), you will find a retrospective of her career on my Bandcamp site and, of course, on all streaming, download, cerebral plugin, and multivitamin psycho-audio pill platforms available on the market, legally (or not).

MODES OF EXISTENCE OF MUSIC?

 

 

"This means that as listeners, we must first ask ourselves why and how a musical work exists, rather than simply rushing to judge whether it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly."

 (Luciano Berio, Forme, 1960) 

 

I find this idea particularly interesting... Whether listening “passively” or simply for aesthetic reasons, according to the criteria of taste prevailing in a given society, Berio invites us to question music: both the question and the answer must be constructed by the listener. But ultimately, it is a matter of understanding why and how a musical work was composed and is being performed here and now. What makes it possible, even necessary? What space does it create? What temporality? 

More than sixty years later, Bruno Latour's work, An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns (Harvard University Press, 2013), perhaps invites us to revisit the question posed by Berio...

What are the modes of existence of music? And what new art of listening can this question give rise to? 

 

 

ANDROMEDA

 

Dear all, 

First, I would like to wish you a very happy 2026, with happiness, health, and many new musical discoveries to help us endure the dystopian world in which we live.

The Cyclical Dreams label has just released my first album for 2026: “Andromeda,” a sonic journey into a distant celestial constellation, where everything is sparkling lights and mysterious resonances in vast cosmic expanses.

It is pure space music, atmospheric, organic, and climatic, attempting to reconnect with some of the sonic explorations of the Berlin pioneers in the 1970s. It is music of escape and dreams, inspired by Andromeda, daughter of Cassiopeia and wife of Perseus in Greek mythology, who was transformed into a constellation after her death.

The album is on sale until January 7, at a discount price.

                                                                 LINK

Thank you for your continued support!

 Christian

  

"MUSIC IS NOT JUST MADE UP OF NOTES"

 

              

                                          “Gesti” for piano, Dick Higgins - 1979

"Music is not just made up of notes. A musical form is above all an obvious fact, a testimony—it is not a state of mind to be perceived, nor a pattern to be analyzed, nor even a fixed system of communication through which people exchange sounds and meanings just as they exchange goods, based on a conventional economic system. This means that as listeners, we must first ask ourselves why and how a musical work exists, rather than simply rushing to judge whether it is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Categorical judgments such as good or bad, beautiful or ugly—typical of rationalist thinking in tonal aesthetics—no longer allow us to understand why and how a composer today works on audible forms and musical action..."

Luciano Berio, Forme (1960)

in: Ecrits sur la Musique, édition établie par Angela Ida de Benedictis, Cité de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris, 2025, p. 59-60.