How the album, Akousmata came about

Can you tell us about the Akousmata concept?

In my “real life”, I'm a classicist working on Greco-Roman antiquity. I've always been fascinated by this form of transmission of knowledge and wisdom, which didn't involve writing, but was transmitted orally, by word of mouth, from master to disciple. It was esoteric knowledge, reserved for the initiated, and accessed after various initiation rituals. The Pythagoreans, the Orphics, but also the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle, and later the Neoplatonists, were all familiar with this mode of transmission... But the same initiation practices can be found in Tibetan Buddhism, in the yogi traditions of the Himalayas, and in Taoism too.

I wanted to set this sacred, ritualized universe to music, oscillating between the words of the spiritual masters and the silence of the disciples, creating a harmony that goes beyond language.

Each of your albums has its own particular sound and musical language. What is the sound language of Akousmata?

Indeed, I compose and record in cycles, choosing to limit myself to a particular set of instruments and sound palette. This gives the project its “sound color”, atmosphere and unity. For Akousmata, I favored prepared piano sounds that sound like percussion or gongs, combined with voices and pads, the whole unfolding in vast reverberant spaces, like the crypts of ancient sanctuaries...

There's a certain aleatoric and experimental dimension to this album, and the title Akousmata obviously refers to that current of contemporary electro-acoustic music known as “acousmatic”, which emphasizes the spaces and planes of listening surrounding the listener, and the emphasis on pure sound rather than traditional compositional structures.

Can you tell us more about your compositional process?

I now work exclusively with a “virtual studio” and a vast array of plugins and sound libraries. While the MIDI keyboard remains the input instrument, the composition process takes place in the visual space of a DAW, where each track is visualized as a succession of graphic elements, encoding the note played, velocity and all expressive parameters. My multitrack work relies heavily on improvisation, i.e. I play while listening to tracks that have already been recorded. It's spontaneous and intuitive, but also obeys unconscious forms of logic and necessity. Every improvisation, even the freest, follows a direction, a thread.

Then comes the actual composition stage, by moving and deleting recorded elements, following both a visual logic – purifying and emptying the DAW tracks, creating silences, symmetries, alternations - and of course a musical logic: my listening is paramount here. It's all very intuitive and instinctive. This compositional process takes the form of a series of editorial decisions on the basic tracks, decisions taken as I listen, without any prior calculation, based on in-the-moment intuitions about the relevance of a note or motif.

So there's an intuitive, if not unconscious, dimension to my musical writing, which somehow brings out the final composition of a plurality of possibilities from the basic tracks recorded. It's not quite the “automatic writing” of the French surrealist poets, but there's nevertheless a very intuitive dimension to my musical workflow...

You're a member of the Lightwave group, which has produced a series of legendary albums, including Cités analogues, Tycho Brahe and Mundus Subterraneus, to name but a few. How do you feel about the difference between collective composition and solo work?

Improvisation, whether total or to some degree, has always been the basis of Lightwave’s studio sessions and concerts. This was possible because of the strong connivance between us, Christoph Harbonnier and myself, as well as with the other regular contributors, Jacques Derégnaucourt, Paul Haslinger and Renaud Pion. We functioned like a small chamber music or jazz ensemble, where music was created through mutual listening and complementary sound palettes, accompanying and sometimes evolving the compositional ideas that emerged. With Christoph, there was always a kind of telepathic, unconscious dimension, where the sounds we generated and our keyboard phrasing sometimes complemented and blended indistinguishably, as if the composition had been written and thought out in advance. I suppose some of Tangerine Dream's early albums were recorded in this way, and in any case, their concerts in the '70s were clearly based on collective improvisation and this technique of playing by listening to each other...

The music we produced, with Christoph and our other friends, was therefore a collective work, which none of us could have produced individually, because it was the result of a complex set of interactions and joint creation, in the adrenalin of improvisation and collective emulation. This encouraged both great restraint and a certain audacity at times - for example, I played the “Cités analogues” solo on my RSFs modular system in a single take, over Christoph's sequences and polyphony, all recorded live on the Revox, and I still don't understand how it could have happened, given that I'm no ace keyboard player...

Composing as a solo musician is naturally a completely different process. You're on your own and no longer have the challenge and incentive of another musician beside you. You're at a different, more personal level of coherence: the music reflects an individual rather than a collective entity. The process is more conscious, more reflexive. You can't take the easy way out and compensate for the absence of your partner's critical eye.

I feel I can progress, deepen and broaden my musical horizon by experimenting with new directions every day. In a way, it's a question of imposing rules and limits on myself, of setting frameworks, and making them evolve while remaining within a sound and a style that are my own. It's a question of evolving within what makes up my musical identity, without giving in, once again, to the complacency and ease of repeating the same thing... Looking back over my solo albums, I see a definite evolution, with thresholds and shifts, even if there are obvious constants.

Your solo musical activity also coincides with a radical technological leap, from hardware to the virtual studio...

Yes. In Lightwave, we started integrating the first virtual instruments into our studio sessions with Reaktor and Absynth from Native Instruments. From the 2000s onwards, I extended this approach, which enabled me to compose and experiment at home, recording on Logic Audio. It has to be said that, given the equipment Lightwave had at the time, it was necessary to have a full dedicated room for our studio. We moved several times, and for several years shared a studio with our friend Hector Zazou in a vast industrial building, where musicians and audio-visual production companies coexisted. Then Christoph converted the garage and basement of his suburban house into the Lightwave studio, and we worked there for several years. This had its advantages: all the equipment was installed, wired and ready for use immediately, in a soundproof space. While Christoph had all the equipment on site, it was a little more complicated for me...

The digital home studio gives us greater flexibility, but we lose direct contact with the machines and have to rethink the way we interact with each other musically. My personal experience, however, is largely positive, at least for my personal musical work.

A hardware studio requires a relatively stable configuration of instruments, effects and cabling. This has the advantage of providing a familiar creative environment and encouraging work routines. The virtual studio, organized by a DAW, does not impose a predetermined configuration. On the contrary, with each new recording session, the musician creates his or her own set-up, choosing instruments and effects and assembling them to suit a particular creative project. It's a bit like setting up a different studio for each recording session, without the tedious task of moving instruments around and rewiring everything...

Added to this is the possibility of composing a palette of sounds from banks of presets and libraries of samples, or experimenting with randomized sound generation, using the randomization functions of certain synthesizers, and serializing processing and spatialization effects according to experimental and sometimes... unorthodox schemes... All this is done on screen, with the mouse, in a great economy of space...

And then, of course, there's the extraordinary possibility of being able to record direct to disk on a DAW, with infinite possibilities for correction and editing that weren't possible with external recorders, such as the Alesis ADATs - they did, however, mark a huge step forward in making digital multitrack recording accessible to independent musicians.

Can you tell us more about your virtual studio?

I've always considered the musical result to be more important than the list of instruments, in the same way that a pastry is judged by its final taste rather than the list of ingredients... LOL... But I can give an outline of my set-up... I've been using a Roli Seaboard keyboard for a few months now, whose ergonomics and feel are very different from a traditional midi keyboard. But the possibilities in terms of expressiveness, modulation, gestures and simply unconventional playing are absolutely fascinating. This keyboard is almost like a modular synthesizer front end, so radically can it transform sounds...

For instruments, I have the usual suspects, in particular plugins from Native Instruments and Arturia. Kontakt has become a must, with a very large number of editors offering original and more or less experimental instruments. I also use instruments from Spitfire and Orchestral Tools, as well as UVI, trying to stray away from the more conventional sounds. My current favorite instruments are experimental and avant-garde synthesizers, specifically designed for adventurous sound design: notably those produced by Traktion and Dawesome.

I also like to experiment with granular synthesis, which produces highly experimental results from existing sound materials - in this way, I “recycle” some of my earlier pieces, which become totally unrecognizable new compositions.... It's a form of radical remix...

Beyond the ergonomic gains and the reconfiguration of your set-up, what is the main contribution of these virtual instruments to your musical work?

I'd say they've enabled me to take my music in new directions, thanks to a renewed palette of sounds. I'm a big fan of classical, contemporary and chamber music, and Lightwave's most recent productions, such as Caryotypes and Bleue comme une orange, have gone in this direction, thanks in particular to Jacques Derégnaucourt, who wrote a string quartet for us. I find it exciting to be able to experiment with “mixed” or hybrid modes of composition, using samples libraries that allow us to approach the phrasing and expressiveness of acoustic instruments or ensembles, or even the human voice. I'm not at all going in the direction of trailers and film music, with compositions that would try to recreate the illusion of a real symphony orchestra.

But mixing sampled and purely electronic textures opens up infinite possibilities - minimalist, atmospheric, contemporary. More generally, the sound palette I have at my disposal today far exceeds that of my hardware instruments, allowing me to combine FM, granular, analog emulation and sampling syntheses.

The vast range of possible choices can be confusing at times, but remains a formidable invitation to creativity...

And finally, where does Lightwave stand today?

I'm still in close contact with Christoph, who has moved to a farm in a small village in Burgundy. This remoteness doesn't make things any easier, especially as Christoph is thinking of recreating the studio into a barn, which would require a lot of work... Over the last few months we've undertaken the backup of all Lightwave's recordings over the years, copying Revox, DAT, ADAT tapes onto hard disk... There are dozens of hours of studio sessions and live recordings, spanning our entire period of activity, and multi-track recordings naturally lend themselves to a whole lot of editing and mixing work.

In recent years, Christoph has collaborated extensively with Michel Redolfi on sound design projects, notably for urban transport in major French cities, but also on the sound design for the Nausicaa oceanographic center in Boulogne-sur-Mer.

We are also still in contact with Paul Haslinger, who is pursuing his career as a film composer in Los Angeles, and we regularly discuss the idea of new collaborations.

So hopefully, we will have exciting news to share in the near future...