My Bandcamp Page: Roadmap of a creative journey

 

Link to my Bandcamp Page

My Bandcamp page is like a roadmap of my musical journeys. Since the beginning of March 2022, my 65 albums are all milestones in an ongoing adventure.

Over the past two and a half years, my music has evolved, as have my instruments... While the first albums were based on unpublished material recorded in previous years, in the tradition of Lightwave music, in a very “cosmic” and space music style, I then moved towards more minimalist albums, reflecting my fascination with the ambient music of Brian Eno and Harold Budd in particular, and then towards albums open to a certain abstraction, on the borderline between electro-acoustic and contemporary chamber music, mixing electronic textures and acoustic instruments modified by various sound treatments.

These three coherent threads intersect and unfold over time:

- space music, following on from the experimental phase of the Berlin School and the first Lightwave albums

- ambient and minimalist music

- mixed chamber music, atmospheric classical...

My 65 albums were conceived and assembled from hours of recording, experimentation, improvisation and sound research.

Each album is built around a sound palette, a concept, artwork and the choice of certain instruments, limiting dispersion and favoring the deep exploration of a predetermined technical set-up.

I'm once again offering my entire Bandcamp discography at a 75% discount:

77 euros for 65 albums! That's just over one euro per album!

This is your chance to immerse yourself in my musical workshop and follow the threads of my creative labyrinth...

Almost three days and nights of non-stop ambient music!

And you'll also be supporting independent music creation, in a direct, personalized relationship between listeners and musicians, the antithesis of the algorithmic anonymity of streaming platforms.

 

THOUGHTS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS : MINIMALISM

 

                                                     Yoko Ono. "Secret Piece" (1953)

I've always been interested in minimalist music, although this label can encompass very different styles.

Among my favorite musicians are Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveiros, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Toru Takemitsu, Harold Budd, Brian Eno, Peter Michael Hamel (non-exhaustive list...).

In my personal musical practice, I have been led to reflect more precisely on this concept of minimalism.

It seems to me that there are two ways of approaching it: from the musician's point of view, and from the listener's point of view.

From the musician's point of view, first of all. The sophistication of today's instruments and the multitrack recording capabilities of DAWs encourage overload, both in terms of instrumental tracks and sound processing levels. The natural inclination of the electronic musician is to achieve “big sound”, by superimposing tracks, multiplying rhythmic lines, drums and sequences, saturating sound space, and fearing emptiness and a drop in tension.

In my own musical practice, as I've already written, the main step consists in erasing, purifying, emptying, slipping in silence - in short, letting sound and silence breathe together.

This minimalism is also that of some painters, architects or sculptors, who avoid overload and filler to concentrate on the essence.

We could call this procedure “subtractive composition”. It can be governed by various rules, mathematical combinatorics, crossed time scales, or by the intuition of creative and reflexive listening, of a floating attention that recomposes the sound spectrum of a composition by successive withdrawals of all that is secondary and accessory.

 

           Toshi Ichiyanagi “Stanzas for Kenji Kobayashi”  (1961)

 

Secondly, from the listener's point of view.

We need to learn to listen to music from a minimalist perspective: for example, to discern the thread or threads running through the musical composition and follow them in their continuity, to perceive the scansion of silences, to discern the sound planes and their architecture, in short, to unfold in listening the space-time of a composition, in terms of volumes, surfaces, lines and vectoriality.

The listener can also choose this minimalist listening approach with compositions that are not specifically minimal. I've often listened to an album by Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze, for example, and become attached to a polyphonic or melodic line in particular, the punctuation of a bass, the loops of a sequence, and give that particular element a particular relief, recreating and modifying my perception of the whole piece. The same goes for listening to a jazz standard or a classical composition: I like to isolate, for example, Gary Peacock's bass playing in Keith Jarrett's trio, or to follow a particular melodic line in a Bach concerto, then gradually integrate a second, then a third.

The listener's ear is thus a musical instrument in its own right, with its own sensitivity and settings, its own memory and culture: it adds the final touch to the musical composition, bringing it into the realm of both physical materiality and intersubjective communication.

 

 

Alien Garden

 

"Alien Forest"... I love to explore possible worlds through my music... This little clip is perhaps the starting point of a new album, who knows....

Learning Seaboard: Immersion in new sonic oceans...

 

 

Last night, a dizzying immersion in a new multidimensional musical universe...

 

First experiments with my new Seaboard Rise keyboard from ROLI : sculpting soundscapes in five dimensions and rediscovering the infinite possibilities of the hand and finger on a tactile surface...

 

A new approach to gestures on a musical keyboard: caress, percussion, climb, cross, sink, fly...

 

The keyboard becomes a harp, a ondes martenot, a futuristic orchestra, a modular synthesizer facade with a thousand possible settings, unfolding new worlds of sound...

 

I begin my learning curve in this new MIDI environment with a totally psychedelic immersion.

 

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/

https://open.spotify.com/.../artist/4q4V7ci4nsWYEoPSb09voh

 

 

THOUGHTS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS: ABOUT ABSTRACTION

 

I love abstraction in music. In the music I listen to, and in the music I create myself.

This is undoubtedly due to the formatting of my musical ear over the years, to the fine tuning of my listening.

Among a few landmarks of my musical education, certain experimental parts of Pink Floyd, and then of course the beginnings of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, then the discovery of electro-acoustic and contemporary music, a certain form of free jazz or improvised music.

Abstraction is first and foremost an experience of uprooting oneself from familiar landmarks and immediate, illustrative and figurative references. Musical abstraction leads to a different listening experience, as it is not preformatted by predictable compositional patterns. If it can generate a certain discomfort, it also reconfigures listening by giving an active role to the listener, who must invent his or her own reference points, his or her own grids of apprehension.

I think it's also a way of apprehending music in its very essence, without projecting a pre-established narrative or descriptive filter, freeing oneself from the expectations of a familiar musical form, be it classical music (concerto, symphony, etc.) or certain rock standards (verses, choruses, etc.).

As a musician, abstraction for me is associated with the idea of creative freedom, of exploring and experimenting with sound worlds of different architecture, comfortable or not, intellectually and sensorially challenging.

Above all, abstract music is a form of experience requiring active involvement on the part of the listener to enter a parallel universe with its own rules, in terms of geometry, volume, color and movement.

In this respect, abstract music is comparable to an abstract painting or sculpture: escaping the most immediate interpretative grids, it opens up a multisensory reception space in which the listener plays an active role, projecting onto the sounds his or her own auditory memory, imagination, reference points and visualizations.

"PAR VENTS ET MAREES": A COLLABORATION ALBUM WITH ANDREW HEATH!

 Dear all,

I am very happy and proud to share with you my collaboration with my friend and fellow ambient musician Andrew Heath, released by the Dutch label Slow Tone Collage (a subdivision of Shimmering Moods).

I hope you will enjoy this album as much as we do! 

 

This immersive collaboration between the UK based musician, Andrew Heath and French musician, Christian Wittman charts a musical voyage that explores themes of great tides that rise and fall and of air currents that flow between lands and seas.

Dense clouds and currents of electronic sound are permeated with sharp, pin-pricks of percussion and modular noises with drifting piano, both electric and acoustic along with guitar notes that float above the maelstrom. All bound with field recordings that resonate sympathetically alongside the drifting tones.

Sometimes light, sometimes dark - evoking the contrast between the apparent calm of the sea, and the dynamics and flows that unfold, both in depth and in the air, creating organic and immersive soundscapes, aerial and underwater at the same time.


As well as many solo releases under his own name, Andrew has collaborated with artists including legendary German musician, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, experimental electronic and classical composer, Christopher Chaplin, Dutch ambient guitarist, Anne Chris Bakker, Argentinian composer Mi Cosa de Resistance and UK artists, Toby Marks (Banco de Gaia), James Osland and Simon McCorry. Andrew has also been commissioned to produce works for film, installations and various arts festivals.

Christian is a founding member of Lightwave, a French group which has been tracing a unique creative path in the field of electronic and ambient musics  (Erdenklang, Hearts of Space, Signatures/Radio France...). They have collaborated with Paul Haslinger (ex-Tangerine Dream), Jon Hassell, Hector Zazou among others, and created spectacular sound installations in places such as the Choranche caves in Vercors mountains or the Oberhausen Gasometer in Germany. The many solo releases of Christian chart musical territories at the crossroads of ambient, atmospheric classical and minimalism.

[REVIEW] Ambient Chamber Music

 

 

CHRISTIAN WITTMAN – Ambient Chamber Music

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-chamber-music

"Not only a perfect title but a set of tracks, from just over 5 to nearly 12 minutes in length, that perfect encapsulate what the musician is wanting to create and that is cosmic electronic music in an almost Classical setting without actually sounding Classical or Orchestral. From the opening 10 minutes of “Hybrid Dreamscape” onwards, this is synths and electronic music that is at the hinterland between space and strings, with a feel, flow and form that is utterly engaging, and continues in this vein right to the end, but in the process, explores some magnificent and magical soundscapes, along the way. 

 In many ways and many areas along the journey, the sound is similar to what you hear on the first and last tracks on Tangerine Dream's epic “Zeit” album, with that heady mix of synths and strings, exploring a darkness that is completely outer space, yet retaining a light to which you are inexorably drawn. In fact, there are times where you are most certainly hurled back into the early seventies adventures of the drummer-less Tangerine Dream, as the music moves through time and space with a cosmic purpose on a seemingly unending journey that you have to take. 

It's not all cosmic icing though, in fact very little of this is what the American synth fraternity would describe as “blissful”, and a lot of it is quite dark while not being dense, unafraid at times to voyage into more avant-garde realms, but then quickly emerging to trace a whole new path through the cosmos. Easily one of his best albums for a while, this transfixes and maintains its quality throughout, always moving, sometimes subtly, and always taking you along for the ride."

Andy Garibaldi, review published in Audion #79,  p. 40.

 

 

"EBB and FLOW" : IMMERSIVE AND SLOW AMBIENT MUSIC

    

 

The guiding idea behind my new musical project, “Ebb and Flow”, is the hypnotic and slow back-and-forth of ocean waves on the mainland shore. The tides roll in and out, a slow movement of advances and retreats, where an edge of white foam traces the ephemeral boundary between water and land, between salt and sand, depositing infinitesimal harmonics and sound events on the edge of listening...

You could say that “Ebb and Flow” is an album of cosmic music, exploring not celestial immensities, but the slow and organic rhythms of the sea, which blend different clocks in an incessant movement that shifts lines and colors surfaces.

Minimalist music, based on recurrence, loops that come and go, the slow fade out of harmonic waves, lending itself to a contemplative gaze and listening that extracts itself from the tumult of the world to approach its silent truth and beauty... 

Thoughts and Afterthoughts: About my music...

 

How and why talk about my music?

Isn't music enough in itself?

Should we talk about ourselves? And expose ourself to the pitfalls of self-promotion, the ridicule of egocentric blindness?

What's the point of opening the doors of my studio, whether physical or virtual, if not to lay bare a panoply of tools, mostly known to all, that have lost all magical evocative power?

What defines a painter is not brushes, canvases, easels or color palettes...
But the eye and the imagination.

The same goes for the musician. Forget plugins, vst, etc. It's the ear and the imagination that matter.

And yet, how can we resist the desire to know, the desire to understand what underlies musical creation? How can we fail to find the words to express and share it?

This exercise in introspection or self-analysis, in which I am both the questioner and the answerer, leads me to a first idea.

Time

Music is about time. Beyond the obvious, I want to say that over the decades of my musical journey, with the Lightwave group and then solo, every studio session, every concert, every recording, is a segment of life, of my life, of my evolution, and keeps track of my emotions, creative impulses, imaginary horizons, particular mental states.

And over time, my music has also metamorphosed, crossing different technological thresholds, from analog modulars to midi, then from midi to today's virtual studio.

This temporal evolution is also that of the appropriation, or even detour, of these different tools, of the renewal of brushes and palettes of sound colors, but also of a musical apprenticeship in the making, where my ear as well as my instrumental playing are shaped over time, progressing, refining, trying to reach the essential.

Space

Music is, of course, also about space. In addition to the distribution of instruments in the stereophonic field, today's music uses multiple spatialization tools to create depth, movement, three-dimensionality and ephemeral geometries: electronic music now has, perhaps more than any other, an immersive, enveloping, vertiginous power, offering the listener unprecedented acoustic spaces, changes of perspective, new positions in space-time and sound-space.

From this point of view, each musical track is at once a landscape and a sculpture, a surface and a volume, as many ways of creating and delimiting possible worlds and opening up their exploration. This idea of "possible world" is central to my music. It comes of course from Brian Eno and Jon Hassell seminal creations. It is also nourished by the inspiration of historical figures (Percival Lowell, Athanasius Kircher, Tycho Brahe in the Lightwave albums) as well as by my constant reference to cartography, celestial spheres, astronomy and cosmology (and my album for Whitelabrecs, "The Story of the Sun, Moon and Stars" is a good example).

Slowness

From this constant interplay of space and time emerges what I believe to be a constitutive trait of my music: slowness. I perceive this slowness in a graphic and visual form: as lines and shapes that emerge from indistinctness, become clearer, then gradually decline until they are lost again in silence. This linearity can be broken by sound events, melodic or abstract, which are like punctuation marks in long sentences, shifting and refocusing listening, but also enabling us to move from one state of awareness and listening to another, as in certain "mindfulness" meditation practices.

Slowness is essential for me: my music needs to take its time, to unfold in a certain duration to provoke immersive listening, to adapt to the mental flow of images, sensations and affects, mine and those of my listeners.

Craftsmanship

Last but not least, an essential feature of my musical work is its artisanal dimension. I don't see myself as an academic (sound) engineer or composer, but as a craftsman, a tinkerer, even a poacher, who has acquired a certain know-how over time, and who sculpts and organizes sound and silence with different tools, where dexterity, mistakes, intuition, chance, and the unexpected accident play an important role.  In the early years of Lightwave, my use of modular or semi-modular synthesizers relied on the balance of chance and intention, and to a large extent on the tactile and sensory dimension of the sliders and knobs that enabled the fine tuning of sounds.

Midi keyboards and the first computer-based sound editors enabled me to build up rich sound palettes, sometimes pushing the machines towards unsuspected possibilities thanks to the random and profound redistribution of all their parameters.

Today, the move to a virtual studio paradoxically allows me to reconnect with the creative potential of analog and midi studios: a DAW is basically like a modular synthesizer console, where you can juxtapose or chain together different modules for processing and transforming the original sound signals, to the point of making them unrecognizable and passing them through improbable feedback steps. The immense diversity of plug-ins available on the market, beyond industry standards, lends itself to extremely advanced customization, allowing each musician to shape his or her own sound spaces and aesthetics.

As for virtual instruments, today we're seeing the emergence of highly specialized synthesizers, working with waveforms or granular synthesis, driven by complex algorithms and random engines, and offering unique sound palettes, often highly experimental and again reminiscent of the climates that could be obtained with analog synthesizers coupled with multiple processing tools.

Faced with these highly advanced sound creation tools, which bring to the fingertips of adventurous musicians technologies once reserved for music research centers such as GRM or IRCAM, there are also, of course, the countless banks of sampled sounds, offering an extremely wide palette, from the most generic and conventional to the most experimental and esoteric. Mostly oriented towards "cinematic" music, with a certain standardization of orchestral sounds, they nevertheless lend themselves to multiple forms of personalization, including through the detour of their original settings or their hybridization via different processing modules.

The creative field is therefore extremely open, for multiple uses, mainstream or marginal, conventional or experimental. Beyond the formidable economic aspect, which, for a more or less modest price, allows the vast majority of soundtrack or trailer composers to dispense with the need for a full symphony orchestra or real instrumental soloists, there is also the possibility of experimenting with mixed and hybrid forms of composition, diverting the expected playing of acoustic instruments towards experimental and atmospheric metamorphoses.

Perhaps, deep down, today's electronic musician should take his inspiration from the art of cooking: sounds are the staples, sound treatments are the spices, and he must concoct his own dishes from experience, sensitivity, the inspiration of the moment, and also from chance and unforeseen events that take us off the normative paths to venture down the most creative directions.

(This text was originally published on the blog of Whitelabrecs )
 

 

On Composition (II)

 (illustration: “Music is Easy” Giuseppe Chiari - 1979)

 

 

A few words to complement my post on my composition process...

Multi-track recording on a DAW puts me, as a solo musician, in the position of a band member…

I have to play each new track while listening those I have just recorded, and react to them, imagining how to complete them, how to bounce off them, how to extend them...

As in a real band (and I had this experience in Lightwave, with Serge Leroy, Christoph Harbonnier, Paul Haslinger and Jacques Derégnaucourt), taking the risk of playing anything in relation to what you hear, in a studio session or on stage, or in a solo multi-track recording session, means measuring the risks of adding, muddling or messing things up, and proceeding with economy, the less the better...

My experience at the moment, as a producer of my own music, is that the most important stage is the one where I purge, delete, erase, create silence and breath...

Where others proceed by superimposition, layer after layer, track after track, to create a veritable wall of sound, out of horror of emptiness or silence, I make the opposite choice: return to the essential, create relief and punctuation, let the sounds breathe, sculpt time through silence, create a narrative, a painting, a sculpture with the patterns I choose to keep...

This step of editing, mixing and production is what makes the music, my music, emerge from the sound magma, from the raw materials I've recorded...

It's all a question of dosage, fine tuning, balance, oscillation between sound and silence...

 

Preview: "Luminous Undulations" from my forthcoming album "Ebb and Flow" (Release date: September 4th)

 

Christian Wittman · Luminous Undulations<iframe width="100%" height="300" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1903204177&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true"></iframe><div style="font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc;line-break: anywhere;word-break: normal;overflow: hidden;white-space: nowrap;text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;font-weight: 100;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/wittman-christian" title="Christian Wittman" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Christian Wittman</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/wittman-christian/luminous-undulations" title="Luminous Undulations" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Luminous Undulations</a></div>

On Composition (I)

 

Tonight I recorded a piece entitled “Procession”. Multi-track work on my DAW, Ableton Live.

Four stereo tracks recorded.

The starting point is a very minimalist, repetitive pattern: just four notes, two long, two short, separated by long silences. It's not copy and paste. I play my four notes again and again, with slightly different phrasing and velocity. It's a prepared, percussive piano sound.

Track 2 is an equally minimalist motif, but different, in the same scale, with a soprano voice articulating different vowels, which I combine with key switches. An ethereal, minimalist voice that I spatialize with a reverb plug-in and a multieffect that wraps the sound in a kind of halo.

Track 3 is created from a viola sound, with a soft sustain: I immediately found the harmonic and melodic counterpoint that slips in in response to the soprano voice, with multiple variations that create ever-changing effects of superposition and phase shift.

Track 4 is a copy/paste of track 3, but shifted, and with a bass singer voice.

I dose the effects again on tracks 3 and 4.

Listen, listen again. I clean up the songwriting: I delete some patterns. I shift others. I delete again.

Emptiness and silence make the music breathe.

On all four tracks, I adjust a spatialization effect that rotates sounds and patterns in the stereo spectrum.

I listen and listen again.

I adjust the levels of each track to the nearest millimeter, fine-tuning my mix with my Sennheiser HD 650 headphones, the faithful companion of my musical adventures...

I listen and listen again.

I use Ozone with my usual settings to balance the final mix.

I export the audio in wav. in high definition.

 I listen to it.

Again and again.

 
I like this track.

I didn't think, calculate, write or plan it.

It was created under my fingers, as I listened, intuitively, as I listened to what I was playing.

An improbable, unthought-of creation that came about naturally, without tedious research or trial and error.

Obeying the intuition and unconsciousness of my listening, and an indefinable flow between my gaze on the computer screen, my fingers on the keyboard, my listening, the images and ideas that arise freely, a digital, sonic, musical artifact was created this evening.

I define myself, like Brian Eno, as a non-musician (i.e. with no academic musical background), nevertheless creating something that has to be called music, for want of a better term.

My creative process is intuitive, unconscious and largely uncontrolled, because it's produced in the moment, a bit like the automatic writing of the French Surrealist poets who let words and metaphors rush through their uncontrolled pen.

“Procession”.

I love this song.

I listen to it and will listen to it often, wondering about the chance and necessity that allowed its genesis.

At the moment, “Procession” is part of an album project entitled “Akousmata”. I already have eight tracks for this project. “Akousmata” obviously refers to the current of so-called ‘acousmatic’ music, that is, music that is a little abstract and experimental, aiming to create a different listening experiences. “Akousmata” also refers to the Greek tradition of esoteric and initiatory knowledge, transmitted by word of mouth in certain philosophical schools, such as the Pythagoreans.

I love this idea of passing on hidden knowledge, a vision of the world, mathematical and harmonic keys to thinking about the universe we live in and our place in it.

Tonight's “Procession” is a tiny milestone on this path where knowledge and spirituality intersect, through the mysterious power of sounds and harmonics.

 

 

Coming soon...

Coming soon on my Bandcamp page and all digital platforms...  Minimalist and immersive soundscapes...

 

 My first collaboration with ANDREW HEATH, to be released in september on SLOW TONE COLLAGE (a sub-label of SHIMMERING  MOODS)

 

 Re-issue of Lightwave second cassette as a CD and LP  by BUREAU-B label (first draft of the cover. More info soon...)