Interview by Cyclical Dreams

 

Cyclical Dreams feature Orion Nebula by Christian Wittman

Digital album: https://cyclicaldreams.bandcamp.com/.../orion-nebula-cyd...

 

How was your approach to EM? What are your influences or references for you?

 

 

Like many musicians, I think, I discovered electronic music through the German pioneers, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, Can. I had the chance to see them live on different occasions and their recordings were important milestones for me. What fascinated me about them was a different relationship to time and space, which was also called "cosmic music", but also the invention of new forms of composition and new soundscapes. The first uses of sequencers, on Phaedra and Rubycon, were from this point of view of absolute novelty at the time.

 

I was also a great fan of progressive rock, Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, probably because I found in them the influences of a classical music, as in the case of German electronic musicians.

 

My musical influences then widened in multiple directions, jazz, in particular the productions of the ECM label, American minimalist music (Reich, Glass, Riley, La Monte Young), French concrete and acousmatic music (Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani, Michel Redolfi, to name but a few).

 

But what undoubtedly constitutes the heart of my musical personality is the ambient music of Brian Eno and his extended circle, Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, Roger Eno, and today's "contemporary classical" trend, with people like Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds.

 

I could mention many others influential composers, like the so called “Californian school” who developed an original style and sound, with musicians like Steve Roach, Robert Rich, Iasos and Michael Stearns...

 

 

Tell us about your last album... How do you compose? How was your process? What synthesizer software/hardware do you use?

 

 

Orion Nebula is an album of space music, which tries to escape from the clichés of the genre by putting in the foreground the sound design and the construction of multidimensional listening spaces. I don't conceive "ambient music" without a part of abstraction and experimentation, which makes the listener participate in the creative process, by inviting him to project his own images and interpretations on the soundtrack that is proposed to him.

 

In my compositional process, I often proceed by cycles and projects, choosing for example a concept, or a particular aesthetic or genre. I try to diversify and explore different or complementary directions, rather than sticking to a single identifiable style. 

 

For the compositional process, the starting point is always the choice of a sound palette, from one or more instruments. The sound treatments (reverb, delay...) also have a very important role in the creation of an atmosphere.

 

All my compositions are based on the principle of improvisation and a certain amount of randomness. The arrangement window of my DAW, Live Ableton, is a space of experimentations, of permutations, where the visual and geometrical dimension of the different patterns plays an important role.

 

For the instrumentation itself, I use mainly virtual synthesizers, even if we still have, in the Lightwave studio, a part of our hardware synthesizers. Having worked for years with ARP 2600s or RSK Kobol Expanders has shaped my ear and my touch, and I approach the programming of sounds on computer interfaces in a tactile and empirical way, always looking for customization, even hijacking of sound banks. I also like the virtual instruments that offer a randomization option for creating sound or changing certain parameters.

 

Far from being an impoverishment, virtual synthesizers open up new, almost unlimited spaces of creation for me, and it is then up to the musician to define the frameworks and limits of each of his projects.

 

Even if, at one time, I was surrounded by an impressive wall of modular synths and a square of keyboards, I am no longer a synthesizer fetishist. For me, the most important thing is not the brush or the tubes of paint, but the painting that results from an artistic vision and a set of creative gestures.