Pink Floyd at Pompeii

 I think I first heard Pink Floyd in 1971 or 1972, with Atom Heart Mother and Meddle.

And my first concert was in January 1973, at the Palais des Sports in Paris, where Pink Floyd accompanied Roland Petit's ballets: an unforgettable sensory, visual and aural experience!

The official release of the restored video and remixed album Pink Floyd at Pompeii, - MCMLXXII brings back many memories - I remember seeing the film on French public television when I was young, and I was able to buy a bootleg CD of the soundtrack.

The sound of the double CD remixed by Steven Wilson is flawless,  excellent. It perfectly recreates what Pink Floyd sounded like live in the 70s.

I've never stopped listening to and loving this music. I grew up with it. It made me dream and fly in the outer (or inner?) space...

Listening to this soundtrack again, in the near-perfect version of this remix, inspires me to reflect on a few things...

Firstly, the perfect synergy of a band where everyone's talents contributed to an overall sound and feel. This is as true for the vocals - Rick Wright and David Gilmour on Echoes - as it is for the alchemy of the overall instrumental sound, lead guitar, keyboads, bass, drums.

 
Pink Floyd's music has always had a strong identity in the field of progressive rock... It didn't rely on the virtuosity of its instrumentalists, like Yes, for example. After their debut with Syd Barrett, they broke away from the pop song format. It embraced a certain sonic experimentation not found in Genesis or King Crimson, but rather in Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze (who influenced whom? The subject is still open...).

With relatively classic instrumentation (the VCS 3, if I'm not mistaken, only appeared with The Dark Side of the Moon), but boundless inventiveness, in the use of effects (delays, loops...) as well as in the sequence of climates (A Saucerful of Secrets, Echoes, One of these Days) and dramatic climaxes (Careful with that axe, Eugene), Pink Floyd invites listeners on psychedelic journeys, inspiring multiple images and sensations.
 

Pink Floyd at Pompeii  remains astonishingly innovative and ground breaking, more than fifty years after this recording.

The instrumental sound remains magnificent, between Rick Wright's keyboards and David Gilmour's guitar.

Nick Mason brings a unique percussive swing, enhanced tenfold by his recorded loops.

The whole thing floats in an unlikely, vintage space of time, no doubt... I find that the abstract sound effects on  Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun or A saucerful of secrets remain unrivalled today - from the echo on Rick Wrigh's keyboard playing and Gilmour's guitar to the loops of Nick Mason's drums.

Limited technical resources were compensated by boundless inventiveness...

We hear musicians immersed in an unprecedented experimental trip, who have found in concert situations, with or without an audience, a unique space for expression and creative expansion...

I never tire of listening to these vintage musical trips...

Pink Floyd's music, from the 70s, tells stories, explores territories, maps out possible universes, explores the depths of our imaginations... It leads listeners to immerse themselves in sound worlds that hybridize genres - blues, rock, electro-acoustic experimentation - to generate their own images and inscribe their own memories, over the course of live performances that weave multidimensional sound with the sensory bombardment of light shows out of the ordinary since the early days...

4'33"

 

I know that this famous piece, 4'33", which contributed to John Cage's fame, can come across as a provocation or a joke...

But I find this moment from a Berliner Philharmoniker concert conducted by the great Petrenko absolutely brilliant and moving...

What is silence? Can we listen to silence? What is the sound of silence?

Petrenko tries to grasp and embrace silence, with so expressive gestures, bare hands and an inhabited gaze... There is music in his gestures...

What is a collective, staged silence for musicians? and for an audience?

This excerpt from a concert in the background raises a question: what can be communicated, transmitted and shared through sound and silence? What kind of time is shared in a concert hall, between artists and a crowd of spectators?

This concert extract is not unlike a sacred ceremony, a magical moment, an extraordinary ritual...

The emotion is palpable, not only on the part of the maestro and the musicians, but also on the part of the perfectly silent audience - no one coughs!

About "Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed" — Zen and Music?

 

In a few words, I'd like to explain the project behind my new album.

For some time now, my music has been trying to achieve a certain minimalism, leaving its place to silence, slowness and a form of “controlled randomness”, playing with shifts and superimpositions of motifs in a certain indeterminacy. 

I don't proceed by algorithms or abstract schemes, as John Cage might have done with the divinatory schemes of the I'Ching, but by listening and editing, stretching the time and inverting certain MIDI tracks, and deleting certain notes in these tracks to create zones of silence.

This phase of my musical work corresponds to the music I'm currently listening to: Morton Feldman, John Cage, Somei Satoh, Toru Takemitsu, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveiros. I'm still a big fan of San Francisco's “New Albion” label, which played a major role in the dissemination of American contemporary and experimental music in particular...

                                                 (Snapshot of my current playlist at home...)

For me, slowness goes hand in hand with the deepening of sound, microvariations and repetitions of certain motifs, creating a thread that takes time to unfold. The minimalism of the playing and sound palette goes hand in hand with the interweaving of different sound planes and the slow displacement of sounds in stereophonic space. This aspect fascinates me, because in a way it gives life and movement to the music, and I see in it an analogy with the slowly rotating celestial vault in a planetarium, or the fluid movements of goldfish turning in the pond of a Japanese garden...

Basically, I think I'm trying to transpose my attraction to Zen Buddhism into music: a kind of immersion in listening and the present moment, here and now, letting thoughts run away, letting images and sensations come and go without trying to control them, as the music breathes.

 Through music, I seek to create an immersive, floating listening space that can be heard at different sound levels, at different times of the day. It's basically a return to the profound nature of ambient music, as theorized by Brian Eno, after Erik Satie...

I know that Buddhism was also a source of inspiration for John Cage, Takemitsu, Philip Glass, Eliane Radigue, Meredith Month, and, in the ambient genre, for Robert Rich and others...

Of course, I don't pretend to compare myself to these great names, I simply try to progress along the same path, towards the stripping down of sound, the opening up of listening, and a contemplative, even meditative approach to musical creation.

I'd be delighted if you had the curiosity and time to listen to “Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed”, which is an attempt to move in this direction, and to let me know your impressions, and your criticisms, however harsh!

Music to Listen to with Eyes Closed

   

 

 •• NAME YOUR PRICE UNTIL MAY 10 ••

  

 
I am happy to share with you my new album, "Music to Listen to With Eyes Closed", a bit experimental, a bit abstract, but if you are interested in my music, you probably know what to expect....

70 mn of music!

Each track marks a passage—not in time, but in depth. You are not traveling through songs, but through soundscapes and states of perception: the image behind the eyelid, the silence that carries memories…

There are no melodies to follow, only atmospheres to drift within. What remains is suggestion: of rooms that remember you, of unseen horizons, of a self slowly scattering into the sound field.

It is a Bandcamp exclusivity for now.

My best regards to all!

Christian

Ad Astra

 About Ad Astra, film by James Gray, 2019, starring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones...

Soundtrack: Max Richter

This film fascinated me and I never tire of watching it again...

It's an introspective, cerebral, melancholy space opera centered around two characters: Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) and his father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones).

The film could be described as an “Apocalypse Now” in deep space, on the edge of solar system.

The film tells the story of two quests, Clifford McBride's search for traces of intelligent life at the very edge of the solar system: the obsessive quest of an astronaut, a scientist, to unravel the mystery of life and intelligence: are we alone in the universe?

And Roy McBride's quest to find his father, lost in deep space and on the bangs of reason, the solar system and madness.

This film fascinated me by the beauty of the shots... By the vision of what space travel could be, from Earth to the Moon, from the Moon to Mars, from Mars to Neptune, with its logistics, its hubs, its stopover personnel...

But it was above all the sequence of the meeting, and then the heart-rending farewell between the son and father, that really stood out for me... Tragic, moving scenes....

I'm thinking of Clifford Bride's willingness to die in an infinite drift around Neptune, all ties severed with his son, with the promise of inescapable asphyxiation, but, deep down, the fulfillment of his destiny...

I loved the sober, haunted, inhabited acting of the two protagonists... of the two actors who played them...

And this existential confrontation between a son and his father touched me deeply, for personal reasons.

For me, “Ad Astra” is one of those “intelligent” science fiction films that ask questions, give food for thought, and put the human in the foreground. Christopher Nolan's “Interstellar” would be in the same category - and I'll be talking about it soon, no doubt...

A final word to say that Max Richter's soundtrack seems to me to reflect the introspective and dramatic dimension of the film, at the antipodes of John Williams' fanfare for Star Wars, which are not without their qualities, but that's something else...

MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY

 

 

 (“Stanzas for Kenji Kobayashi” Toshi Ichiyanagi - 1961)

 

"Sans l’impérialisme du concept, la musique aurait tenu lieu de philosophie : c’eût été le paradis de l’évidence inexprimable, une épidémie d’extases."

"Without the imperialism of the concept, music would have taken the place of philosophy: it would have been a paradise of inexpressible evidence, an epidemic of ecstasy."

 

 Cioran, Syllogismes de l'amertume .

 

 

 

 

 

DO I CREATE MY MUSIC?

 

Or does the music create and recreate me?

 

Why, over a given period of time, does the music I compose and record follow the same aesthetic, progress along the same path, as if to deepen and perfect an idea, a concept, a project, a set of physical, mental and imaginary sensations translated into constructed sounds, into a sonic temporality?

 

The same applies to musical composition as to any creative process: painting, sculpture, writing, video, cinema, photography. The artifact created reflects the creator, at a given time and place, what he or she feels, his or her state of mind, his or her experience.

 

In fact, I believe this is what will always distinguish human creation from creation by artificial intelligence: the latter has no experience and no state of mind. At least not yet.

 

The music I'm creating at the moment is a quest for slowness and fluidity, almost organic, almost biological and cellular. Sounds stretch, hybridize, meet and collide.

 

I set to music the mathematical theory of percolation, which models the diffusion of ideas, viruses, language games and tics, representations and models in a society.

 

It's all bounces, echoes, forks and splits, like a kind of billiard table or pinball machine where the trajectory of sounds is unpredictable and random, yet obeys a profound logic and necessity, that of the life of sounds, which are born, move and fade away.

 

I love this moment in my musical journey, when I play with silence and time, with concept and chance. It's fascinating to work with sounds, to assemble and construct them in an architecture where space and time are so closely intertwined.

 

There comes a time when a writer, painter, filmmaker or sculptor finds his or her own voice. I don't pretend to compare myself to the immense creators who have made our world more beautiful, our lives more bearable, through their visions, their language, the audacity of their proposals.

 

No, I have no such pretension.

 

But I do have the impression, in the course of my musical work and my album releases, that I'm gradually building a world, a possible world, a world of my own, a cosmology and an ontology that puts sounds in order, in the space-time of a listening session.

 

I don't care if I'm not commercial, if I don't bend to the standards of Spotify playlists and the like.

 

I make MY music. Music that reflects ME, that sounds like ME. Music that accompanies ME on my creative and existential quest.

And if you want to listen to my music, please feel free to visit my bandcamp page or all the usual streaming / downloads sites...

 

https://christianwittman.bandcamp.com/