[Interview by Jacopo Vigezzi, originally published in Prog Rock Journal, July 10; republished with permission. Link ]
You’ve worked with avant-garde giants like Jon Hassell and Hector Zazou. What did those collaborations teach you about “sculpting” sound that you still use in your solo and collaborative work today?
— Hector Zazou marked an important moment in our journey… We shared the same studio for a few years, a loft located in a repurposed industrial site. He listened to us a lot, and we also listened to his music a lot… He invited us to participate in some of his projects, and we were lucky enough to appear on three of his major albums, Les Nouvelles Polyphonies Corses, Sahara Blues, and Chansons des mers froides. We have one exceptional memory: when we improvised live in the studio with Ryuichi Sakamoto. We had moved all our instruments to the Davout studio in Paris; Sakamoto arrived and sat down at the piano, and we improvised. Zazou extracted and edited parts of that memorable session… We also met David Sylvian, with whom we co-wrote a track that appeared on the first version of the album...
I think Hector Zazou taught us new ways of working, a certain rigor. He also encouraged us to step outside our musical comfort zone to adapt to more complex projects, as collaborators and sound designers… We worked with him on an album project in the style of The Orb and KLF, a project that wasn’t finalized but for which we still have the demos… A very unusual sound and style for Lightwave!
As for Jon Hassell… He’s been one of my favorite musicians for years… I’ve seen him in concert many times; his discography is also on the playlist I’d take to a desert island. Taking part in this concert as part of the Présences Electroniques festival at Radio France was a unique musical and human experience. Jon brings to his breath, to his trumpet playing, a kind of immemorial memory, emerging from the depths of time, somewhere between Africa and Asia. He has a unique sound—a chant, a lament, human breath—or perhaps it is the breath of the winds, or the breath of every living being, human, vegetal or animal. Working with him on the Shift concert was a privilege. We recently rediscovered the recordings of the rehearsals for thaat concert, and we’re hopeful we’ll be able to release them on noion soon...
Your recent solo work, like “Views of Mind,” leans toward “ambient chamber music.” How did that introspective style bleed into the more expansive, genre-defying textures we hear on “Mallarmé” and “Borges”?
— My solo music has naturally evolved since I started posting it online in 2022. I think I’ve gradually moved away from the space music and dark ambient atmospheres of the Lightwave era, toward a more minimalist and airy approach—more atmospheric and experimental… I’m trying to engage in a more experimental and demanding approach, moving away from the clichés of ambient music to gradually subvert them, asking listeners to make the effort to step outside their comfort zones at times…
The most important thing for me is to follow my own creative path, without compromising for what might be more or less commercial or mainstream. I’ve never been concerned with fitting into the narrow confines of popular ambient playlists. I’ve gradually moved toward a hybrid style of music, combining electronic sounds with sampled acoustic instruments, enriched by various spatialization techniques. I’m thus moving toward a form of music that’s both minimalist and contemporary, blending various influences—particularly that of Morton Feldman in my recent recordings. My music leans toward slow evolutions, compositions that are both aleatory and based on combinatorial algorithms. During my recording sessions, I envision sculptures in motion, somewhat like large mobiles where colorful, sound-producing objects are in perpetual rotation along different orbits and rhythms. These new approaches led to the basic tracks for “Mallarmé” and “Borges”; they are at the heart of the aesthetic that Paul and I are trying to develop in noion.
In your early days, you utilized legendary machines like the Polymoog and the RSF Polykobol. How has your relationship with your instrumentarium—specifically the ARP 2600 and modular systems—evolved since the 80s?
— Indeed, since the early days of Lightwave in the second half of the 1980s, we have witnessed a spectacular evolution in electronic instrumentation. We started out working with analog synthesizers, modular systems like the ARP 2600 and the RSF, or the Korg 3300. Then we saw the arrival of the first MIDI synths, samplers, and the first sound editors and DAWs on computers. Next came the first virtual instruments, and Native Instruments’ Reaktor played a major role in my setup, alongside hardware instruments. We still have a few hardware instruments in the Lightwave studio, which is now located at Christoph’s house in the countryside, but we’ve sold most of them over the years.
My current studio is entirely virtual. Virtual instruments have seen exponential development and can now adapt to all genres of music, even if the most commercial genres, like techno and IDM, are favored. Having composed for a long time with analog and modular instruments—where we had to build the sound ourselves using complex wiring and often minute adjustments—has given us real expertise in sound programming. From this perspective, certain virtual instruments open up unlimited possibilities, particularly when they feature algorithms for randomizing their parameters.
I’m particularly interested in specialized and experimental instruments created by independent developers, often within the MAX environment. They allow for the generation of highly sophisticated sound textures, often by hybridizing different technologies—granular synthesis, sampling, random retroactions, and so on. I am also a heavy user of sound processing plugins, often multi-effects, that offer experimental sound transformation chains. These processes are an integral part of the final result: they sometimes radically transform the initial sound material. I am thinking in particular of GRM Tools and Ircam’s fantastic Time Stretching application.
So I would say that, paradoxically, VSTs and processing plugins come together to form a sort of modular, evolving, and reconfigurable system, where the sounds and stems from the recordings enter into truly fascinating feedback and modulation chains. From my perspective, new digital technologies, while they may encourage a certain laziness due to the immense sound libraries available, also offer tremendous creative possibilities, just as adventurous as the analog synthesizers of the 1970s.
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