Lightwave - Electronic Lutherie

Christoph Harbonnier discovered through Onda Rock that Lightwave have a devoted and passionate following in Italy. This led to an email correspondence, which culminated in this long exclusive interview, reconstructing the history and secrets of one of the most fascinating outfits on the contemporary electronic scene.

When was the Lightwave project born? I've read that it all started with the purchase of a synth.

In 1985 Christian Wittman and Serge Leroy were running a magazine covering the latest music news. Serge was already an enthusiast of analogue machines, and Christian had bought his first synthesizer, an Arp 2600, a dream machine even by today's standards. The following year they decided to found Lightwave, with Laurent Bosecq on board for the first concert. I joined the group in 1986, for the second concert, and the adventure continued for a while without Laurent, then Serge left the group in 1990.

Your formula combines electronics with chamber music, machines with a strong “human” element. What's your key to harmonizing these two different approaches?

At the start we favoured electronics; after a while, though, there was a return towards the acoustic side, which is still present in our recent productions. It's not so much a revenge on the “synthetic” as the result of a more mature, overall reflection that better distinguishes the role of each instrument.

Versatility is the most exciting aspect of sound synthesis. A musician can turn into a more or less talented luthier. Even so, no electronic instrument can rival the timbres of acoustic instruments, which are unquestionably richer.

Fortunately, synthesizers are no longer used as simulators of acoustic instruments, as they still were a few years ago. A new generation of musicians has become aware of how important sound colours are in shaping the personality of a band or an artist. The presence of synthesizers is generally unjustifiable because it fills up the space of a project too quickly.

At the end of the day, music is no longer put together the way it used to be, and that's good news.

As for the relationship between instruments and musicians, that's an age-old question. Lightwave's music is something none of us would be able to make alone. Often, listening back to recordings, we no longer know who did what, and it's the colours of the instruments, when we're able to tell them apart, that let us identify with the music. We feel it's essential for all the musicians, whether playing electronic or acoustic instruments, to be involved at the moment of composition, in order to spot the flaws.

The main difficulty lies in keeping a global vision of our project, choosing the right instrument intelligently. In Lightwave's experience, we've often questioned these complex instruments in order to create our musical universe, in which gesture and interaction are essential.

That's something Jacques Dérégnaucourt has perfectly folded into his instrumental palette, in which he excels both with electronics and with acoustic instruments. The same goes for Renaud Pion, who plays synthesizers alongside electronic wind instruments. Straight away, our project takes on another dimension.

I imagine your background draws heavily on kosmische musik, but also on musique concrète, ambient and contemporary music. Do you feel a particular connection to any names from today's avant-garde electronic scene?

Christian and I actually owe a good part of our musical education and influences to deep, eclectic listening to electronic music. From the great classics of the Berlin school to contemporary ambient music (Eno, Budd, Hassell), from the works of GRM to the repetitive music of Reich, Glass, Adams, ethnic music and contemporary music more broadly. This kind of listening trains the ear, gives you a sense of space and of how sounds can be organised, and gradually leads to developing an original compositional voice.

We're extremely curious (and demanding) about current releases. But despite our roots, Lightwave's music also draws inspiration from very different registers, such as rock, jazz, classical, jungle, and film scores.

We're strongly influenced by the creativity of certain producers and sound engineers, both for music and for images, and by the various interactive processes used to produce electronic music. Recording and sound-processing technologies are now so powerful that they play a major part in shaping the aesthetics of the music, which ultimately emerges from studio experimentation.

Each of your records seems structured as a kind of "musical journey". But the ultimate goal seems to be a journey into the mind and the subconscious. Is that right?

Indeed, looking back over our discography, or at the improvised recordings made a few months later, we've asked ourselves the same question. We talk about logic, coherence, or narrative. Many factors, including those of the subconscious, influence human action. Our respective subconscious minds probably intervene in Lightwave in some way. When we're composing, each of us is deeply focused and listening closely to what the other is doing. Over these twenty years of collaboration, Christian and I have come to know our own reactions through this ongoing exchange. Even after long breaks, we spontaneously fall back into our old reflexes, both in the studio and on stage.

The example of the 1996 Uranography concert shows how important it is to be able to react in ways quite different from those of the recording studio when faced with a technical mishap, rediscovering a spontaneity driven by intuition and by the audience's intensity. Absorbed by our machines, often without even looking at them directly, we feel less intense sensations: that contact is essential for any artist wanting to keep their music alive.

You seem particularly drawn to figures from the history of science. Two of them, Tycho Brahé and Athanasius Kircher, inspired two of your finest and most important albums ("Tycho Brahé" and "Mundus Subterraneus"). You seem to take a kind of "naturalistic" approach to electronic music, as if looking to the past in order to better read the future...

We wanted to move away from the standard image of electronic music, whether that meant technical or spatial visions of the future, or the pastel shades of new age. If a good deal of today's ambient electronic music can be described as comforting, light, and full of grand dreams, we chose instead to make music of the night and of metaphysical vertigo, music in constant motion, where cycles and ruptures are unpredictable. Far from being music of anguish or despair, it feels to us more like an exploration of depth, of another side of reality, one where forms of beauty and serenity also exist.

The examples of "Tycho Brahé" and "Mundus Subterraneus" are leaps into the past, into certain roots of European culture and science. They are powerful universes that transcend the divide between science and the imaginary, between reason and fantasy.

"Tycho Brahé" embodies naked-eye astronomy, through a giant measuring instrument, the obsessive cataloguing of the stars, that moment of crisis in which one must try to reconcile the evidence of phenomena with the authority of a cosmological model that organises the entire vision of reality in advance. Tycho Brahé is one of the last great pre-Copernicans, and a forerunner of Kepler and of modern astronomy.

As for Kircher, he embodies the intellectual and spiritual climate of Baroque Rome: a scholar and member of the Society of Jesus, he authored an encyclopaedic body of work of which little still holds up today. His works, moreover, were never really settled... His is a complex, and at times deviant, mental universe, where occultism, alchemy and technical experimentation blend together with the compilation of the Greco-Roman library, Christian mysticism, observations of nature, and the interpretation of archaeological remains and dead languages.

"Mundus Subterraneus" genuinely fascinated us: a journey into the bowels of the earth, but also into human knowledge and the unconscious. It's a path that runs between scientific curiosity and fears, bad dreams, the ghosts of the unconscious. We tried to express this very particular universe in musical form, this fascination with the hidden face of the Earth and of reality.

Your "Mundus Subterraneus" became reality when you decided to go down into the Choranche caves to record "Cantus Umbrarum". Can you tell us something about that experience?

After the experience of our six-month interactive installation for the Oberhausen gasometer concert, we immediately took on the "Cantus Umbrarum" project during the 38th Rugissants de Grenoble festival. That festival allowed us to put together a large sound installation and a musical programme for the Choranche caves, in the Vercors region (France). Between September and October 1986, we recomposed new tracks and recorded numerous actors' voices in different languages, to illustrate the myth of the cave. The 12-channel production was complex to achieve at the time, since we didn't have the right equipment. Everything was recorded, edited, cut and mixed across 40 Adat tapes, then mastered by Michel Geiss onto 12 synchronised CDs. Setting up the 24-track installation in the cave took a full day and night. For a week we lived in the caves eight hours a day, giving two concerts a day. It was a fantastic experience, shared with the speleologists who helped and accompanied us on this adventure. The festival audience was thrilled to discover this place and this strange music, walking through the galleries with lamps strapped to their foreheads. Many visitors already knew these caves and rediscovered them through our music, listened to in near-total darkness. Others set off to discover an unknown underground world of sound that they would remember for a long time. An unforgettable experience: we wish every musician the chance to try, at least once, a concert deep within the earth. It's magical.

Your latest album, “Bleue Comme Une Orange“, was practically impossible to find in stores. Was there a problem with the record label and distribution?

Nowadays, after many years, artists still face the same distribution problems. Distributors no longer invest in an artist. A CD has to sell quickly and without major investment in promotion. This situation is even more dramatic for music like Lightwave's, which has a niche audience. The price of an audio CD, too high compared to a DVD, is partly responsible for the drop in sales. Digital piracy, CD copying and mp3 formats are questionable but logical responses for anyone wanting access to musical culture. The majors have had to bow to the evolution of audio formats, and they use poor arguments to defend their shareholders rather than the artists. The years of work and commitment that went into making our latest album, "Bleue Comme Une Orange", count for nothing next to the distributors' motives.

The promotion of this album was simply sacrificed because of Radio-France's distributor, who didn't advertise the record in specialist magazines. The CD is only available on the Radio-France website and in a few other places like Amazon or Cdservice.

The disappointment is huge, because it's impossible to promote a CD two years after its release. Radio-France is both producer and publisher, but it's still subject to the same distribution laws. "Mundus Subterraneus" and "Tycho Brahé", as well as "Cantus Umbrarum", were eventually distributed better thanks to the Ars of Space label's network. "Horizon" has reissued the albums "Tycho" and "Mundus" with new artwork. They're now available on the Horizon Music website.

The situation of music today is indeed very paradoxical... We're living through a great digital revolution, one that's often full of contradictions. Today's musician can't ignore it, but nor should they become dependent on technology or let their imagination be dictated by the release of new instruments or an overabundance of material. The impressive number of parameters a musician has to absorb in order to gain new knowledge of an electronic instrument acts as a brake on the time devoted to creation. New technologies have allowed musicians to work alone. At every stage of composition or performance, it's now very easy to give the impression of being capable of creating and composing simply because you can buy an effective electronic setup, with pirated music software and basic home-studio equipment.

This situation leads to a kind of isolation and an impoverishment of emotion. Curiously, the word "nomadic", used in advertising for so many electronic instruments, has lost its original meaning. Nomadism is an attitude of openness to the world, a way of reaching out to people and to musicians too. Our society and today's economy have a tendency to turn the meaning of words on their head far too often.

I read that "Bleue Comme Une Orange" was inspired by Alexander Scriabin's chromatic works, and I also noticed a broader use of classical orchestral instruments: would you say your album is more "classical"?

Simply incorporating the instruments of an orchestral setup isn't enough to earn the label "classical music" - this is still, first and foremost, an electroacoustic experience, one that has undoubtedly given Lightwave's music a more accessible, less abstract image. This allowed new listeners to enter our musical universe in a gentler way, recognising the timbres of familiar instruments.

"Bleue" took a long time to make, developed alongside "Cantus" and "Caryotype". This collective project needs many recording sessions to achieve this coherence, this balance of instruments and minimalist electronic treatments.

The album is enriched by Jon Hassell's magical trumpet: how did you get in touch with him, and what was it like working alongside such an important musician?

Christian went to see Paul Haslinger in Los Angeles. On that occasion he also met the director of the Water Lily Music label, as well as Jon Hassell.

Then there was the concert at Radio France with Jon and Michel Redolfi (at the latter's initiative). Jon really is a great trumpet player. We rehearsed together for a week in the large studio of the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle, Luc Ferrari...) at Radio-France.

The concert took place in the large Olivier Messiaen auditorium, and was broadcast through a system called the Acousmonium.

I find it hard to believe that one of the finest electronic acts of our time is content to simply "have fun making music for a niche audience interested in a different kind of electronic sound", with no real profit motive, as you told me recently. Are you sure your music couldn't reach a wider audience?

Honestly, we're convinced that Lightwave's music could appeal to a much wider audience. We have a loyal following. We're fully aware of the quality of our discography, but the problem lies elsewhere. After eight albums, of which we're proud, we've certainly gained a degree of recognition and an international audience, like many bands, thanks to the internet. But one or two concerts a year, within a disastrous music distribution system, doesn't allow the band to exist on the international scene or to grow its audience.

After all these years of music-making and production, we've come to realize that journalists often had a disproportionate idea of artists and of the means they actually have available to create their work. Music lovers like you at Onda Rock, on the other hand, contribute a great deal to our reputation.

What are your upcoming projects? Do you have a European tour planned to promote "Bleue Comme Une Orange" and your other records? And have you ever thought about playing in Italy?

Imagining Lightwave performing a concert in Italy at one of your archaeological or historical sites would be a dream and an incomparable experience. Music can no longer be confined to concert halls alone. There are so many historical, archaeological and geological sites where truly fantastic concerts could be staged.

A tour to promote "Bleue" isn't in the works for now. Radio-France doesn't have the resources to fund such a project. Much to our regret.

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