[Interview by Jacopo Vigezzi, originally published in Prog Rock Journal, July 10; republished with permission. Link ]
The collaboration between you and Paul Haslinger dates back to 1993’s “Tycho Brahé.” After all these years, what is it about your creative “alchemy” that makes this new partnership so effective now?
Between Paul and us—Lightwave and me—there is above all a forty-year friendship, built on mutual esteem and respect, and shared trust. This friendship was unlikely between a member of Tangerine Dream with an international following and us, musicians from the French underground… But it has grown stronger over the years, during my stays in California and Paul’s visits to Europe. And between Los Angeles and Paris, the internet now allows us to forge multiple creative connections and create a kind of virtual studio, a shared musical workspace, despite the distance and the time difference. Yes, indeed… creative alchemy… building itself through the back-and-forth exchange of tracks, stems, mixes, and ideas across the Atlantic.
It’s a fascinating creative process, because it’s unpredictable, resulting from our interactions, our suggestions, our feedback, our edits, our approvals… We speak the same musical language and therefore have an intuitive understanding of one another. We also trust each other enough to approve or reject what the other is doing. Paul’s editing and mixes based on my basic tracks extend and deepen my initial ideas, while enriching them and sometimes radically reorienting them. The resulting music is truly a shared creation, and it’s often hard to tell who did what in the final composition. It’s a bit like mixing paint palettes to the point where the original colors are unrecognizable in the final phase…
Ultimately, it’s a privilege to develop such a creative collaboration, in such an atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding, and it extends the experience of Lightwave, where we also had the same kind of intuitive musical communication. The difference is that back in the Lightwave days, we worked in the same studio, in live and improvised sessions, whereas with Paul, we work remotely and on a staggered schedule.
Much of the new material was recorded at your Nina Studio in Paris. How does the atmosphere of a European city like Paris influence the “geography” of these recordings compared to the Los Angeles sessions?
Nina Studio is my home studio, set up in my living space, in the inner suburbs of Paris. Obviously, a studio’s location influences creativity: the climate, the light, the vegetation, the architecture, and also, of course, the entire social and cultural environment. But a home studio is also a very personal and intimate space, surrounded by memories and meaningful objects… I also think of it as a workshop I’m accustomed to; I have my work routines there, my tactics and strategies for composition and recording, my favorite tools and instruments…. My studio, moreover, is surrounded by my extensive library of literature and the humanities. I believe this environment contributes significantly to my musical creativity, enriching it with all my reading and my own writing...
For the “Mallarmé” project, you mention capturing the “random, abstract essence” of the text. How do you translate the visual spacing of words on a page into “recurring patterns” of sound?
Our album consists of three parts, each a journey through different sonic and harmonic landscapes, featuring interplay between echoes, transitions, contrasts, and symmetries that evoke the leaps and rebounds of successive dice rolls triggering different harmonic events. We wanted to play with the effects of continuity and rupture, and with forms of sonic ricochets punctuating the listening space. And as if by a mirror effect, our music aims to break the predictability of listening, just as Mallarmé’s text subverted the process of reading: just as the reader of Mallarmé was meant to hear the music of his text (some sources report that he composed his poem by strumming piano chords for entire nights), so too should the listener of our music, ideally, visualize juxtapositions of forms, breaks in line, syntactic ellipses, etc.
You’ve cited “automatic writing” from the French Surrealist movement as a major influence on these albums. Can you explain how you apply this “relaxed state of consciousness” to the highly technical world of modular synthesis?
Unlike strictly programmed music, with synchronized rhythm tracks, etc., or music that is written in advance and performed from a score, Lightwave’s music—and my solo music—relies heavily on improvisation, that is, on unreflective and unconscious creative flows, driven by the internal logic of what we play and hear. Back in the Lightwave days, there were two, three, or four of us improvising in the studio, live. We’d start the tape recorder—first stereo DAT, then ADAT multitrack—and play live, building the composition in the moment, interacting with one another. The first side of *Nachmusik*, for example, was actually recorded live during a single nighttime session, with nothing planned in advance.
In my solo work, I record track by track, but I try to maintain the same spontaneity. At the start of a session, I choose an instrument and go through different sounds… At some point, I settle on one of them and start recording: that sound guides my playing on the keyboard. For the second track, I start with a different instrument, and I play over the first track, on the fly, reacting to what’s already been recorded. And so on. Next comes the real composition phase: I make a rough mix and edit each track on the fly, mainly by deleting isolated notes or entire patterns, creating silences, dialogues between sounds, a progression, and recurrences. This editing process is very intuitive; I essentially read the layered MIDI tracks, reshaping each one in relation to the others, and immediately listening back to each edited section. These are therefore chains of intuitive, uncalculated decisions, made with a kind of floating attention that actually resembles the writing practices of the French surrealist poets, in particular states of consciousness that let the flow of words—and, in my case, sounds—run free.
I think Paul works in a similar way when it comes to editing and mixing the tracks from our respective stems. It’s also with this same spirit that we experiment with different track sequences and settle on a final one we both agree on.
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