Lightwave - Electronic Lutherie

The French outfit Lightwave are one of the key groups in the global electronic music scene of the last twenty years. Blending "ambient" suggestions, "cosmic" electronics, musique concrète and chamber music, these new space couriers are building a bridge between the foundational work of masters like Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, and the refined settings of new gurus like David Sylvian, Robert Rich and The Future Sound Of London. Their "sound architectures" draw on visions of a mythological past, while at the same time sketching the scenarios of an unsettling future.

The group was formed in 1985 on the initiative of Serge Leroy (founder of the "Crystal Lake" association for French electronic musicians) and Christian Jacob (Wittman). "We started out as simple electronic music enthusiasts," explains Christian Wittman. "For years we listened to the masters of the German school (Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream) and the French school (Francis Dhomont, Michel Redolfi, François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani, Pierre Schaeffer), contemporary classical music (Górecki, Arvo Pärt, Ligeti), musique concrète and ambient music (Erik Satie, Morton Feldman, Brian Eno, Harold Budd). Then, by a strange coincidence, I managed to buy my first synthesizer, an ARP 2600, while my friend Serge Leroy had lots of synths and old modular systems. For a while we each went our own way, then we decided to join forces on our experiments. That's how Lightwave was born."

A year later, Christoph Harbonnier joined the duo. In 1988 Leroy left, staying on only as producer of their first works. After putting together several demo tapes, Lightwave released their debut album Nachtmusik (1990). The "night symphony" of the title track immediately showcases the distinctive traits of their sound, which combines musique-concrète textures in the style of composers like François Bayle or Bernard Parmegiani with visionary electronics à la Michel Redolfi and the forays of the German cosmic couriers. Their mysterious atmospheres serve as a soundtrack for the exploration of new, impenetrable worlds.

In 1991, Lightwave began working alongside French composer and producer Hector Zazou and Austrian musician Paul Haslinger, formerly of Tangerine Dream. The latter brought his "classical" background and a special knack for live performance, which would prove essential for the group's tours. In 1992, Lightwave collaborated with Zazou and David Sylvian on the album "Sahara Blue" and also contributed to several compilations.

In 1993, with violinist Jacques Deregnaucourt also on board, Lightwave reaped the most precious fruit of this teamwork: Tycho Brahé, the album that launched them into the firmament of world electronic music. The work, named after a 16th-century Danish astronomer, offers ten abstract frescoes, painted in the delicate, mystical hues of a visionary electronic sound already dubbed "New Age Space Music". Delicate piano lines and sweet harmonies combine with disorienting sound effects, as if Gyorgy Ligeti's "Atmosphères" had ended up on the soundtrack of Jerry Goldsmith's "Alien". Deregnaucourt's violin weaves slender melodic threads, lost in the void of electronic black holes and hyper-expanded "ambient" spaces. Without falling into pretentious avant-garde traps, Lightwave give electronic music a deeply human feel, yet one that is also restless and hallucinated: their "space sketches" do nothing but reveal the inadequacy and anguish of humankind before the immensity of the cosmos.

The record opens with the slow-motion oscillations of "Uraniborg", wrapped in a cloud of hisses and dissonances. The space navigation of "Mapping The Sky", with an electric piano in the foreground, leads into the spectral chill of "Cathedral" and the meditation lost among the galaxies of "Fuga Stellarum", while "Virtual Mechanics" seems almost to simulate a stellar explosion in the distance. The angelic whispers of "Poetics Of The Spheres" serve as a prelude to the unsettling visions of "The Art Of Clockmakers" and the tender "Tycho On The Moon", in which the sound of Deregnaucourt's violin spreads over the piano's melancholy melodies. The sparkling chamber electronics of "Apogee" precede the ode "Hymn For The Guild Of Astronomers" (with a prominent Turkish clarinet), which brings the journey to a close.

Through the explorations of Tycho Brahé, Lightwave lead us by the hand on a magical, yet far from reassuring, space odyssey. Almost as if it were a Kafka story set to music by Tangerine Dream. "One of our concerns," explains Wittman, "is to avoid linearity, creating a kind of 'musical journey' that passes through various stages and landscapes. You could say that much of our music is nothing more than the exploration of new possible scenarios and a mirror of various sensations and memories. We try to carry the listener through various paths of knowledge: we provide the soundtrack, and they have to create their own film and their own screenplay." A formula that eludes any kind of pigeonholing: "Lightwave is not a new age band, nor a group shaped by the Berlin school, nor an electro-acoustic band. We try to cut across all these categories, mixing many languages and musical tendencies, to create our own style and our own aesthetic."

This is also how the following album, Mundus Subterraneus (1995), came about, once again inspired by a scientist of antiquity, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1600), and his journey into the bowels of Vesuvius. "We wanted to steer clear of the clichés of cosmic and science-fiction imagery," explains Wittman. "So we chose two fascinating figures, poised between ancient and modern, between science and imagination, between rationality and fantasy. Hence Tycho Brahé, with his naked-eye observations of the sky and his attempts to interpret the motion of the stars, and hence Athanasius Kircher, an encyclopedic enthusiast of occultism and Eastern studies, with his 'Mundus Subterraneus', which blends chemistry, ancient beliefs and pure speculation."

Mundus Subterraneus is precisely the 800-page compendium in which Kircher developed his geophysical and mythological theories about the underground world, combining the sensationalism of the past with the science of the future. In the same spirit, Lightwave plunge into a mental journey in search of an underground world where arcane myths and technology, futuristic ghosts and demons of the past, coexist.

Performed by a quintet that, besides Wittman, Harbonnier, Haslinger and Deregnaucourt, also includes Charlie Campagna, the album once again blends the majesty of ambient and the austerity of concrète sounds with flashes of classical avant-garde. The effect is at once hypnotic and unsettling, soft and sinister.

The album opens with the descent into the dark underworld of "De Motu Pendulorum", set to obsessive percussion, before moving on to the occult atmospheres of the two "Cabinet de Curiosités" pieces, whirlwinds of chaotic, eccentric sounds that recall the expressionist streak of Robert Wiene's "Cabinet of Caligari", depicting all the scholar's anguish before the unfathomable secrets of Nature. Digging even deeper into the bowels of the earth, we arrive at the tangled sound of "Sonnensturme", marked by the wildest surrealism: low frequencies counterpoint the subtle textures of violin and synthesizers. The immersion into the darkest depths of the world continues with "Towards The Abyss", which sharpens the pathos by recovering some of the most dramatic techniques from Stockhausen's repertoire, while "Roma Barocca" heightens the dreamlike, hallucinated mood. A mood that dissolves into the revelation of a profound truth, brought to light in "Ascension". The end of Kircher's journey is in fact a farewell for now: "Mapping the Earth" promises new adventures in humanity's heart of darkness. The balance of the orchestration is perfect: the sinister hiss of the synthesizers, the chirping of the violin, the surge of the piano, the orgy of noise, dissonance and percussion all help to build an atmosphere of suspense and looming drama.

Having set a standard for electronic music unmatched on the European scene, capable of fusing gothic-romantic passion with the rigorous algebra of the classical avant-garde, Lightwave carried on in this vein with their subsequent albums, albeit without reaching the same expressive heights.

In Der Unterwelt (1996) offers a single twenty-minute suite, narrated by a female voice in German. Cantus Umbrarum (1999) gathers material the group had been working on since 1997 and puts the concept of Mundus Subterraneus into literal practice: the group's own musicians descended into the Choranche caves, in the bowels of the Vercors mountains in France, for the 38th Festival Rugissants. Around 600 meters of tunnels were equipped to record the album. The result is a collection of 13 tracks described as "a poetic exploration of the underground, in search of a world of shadows, stones, memories and oblivion". The music is accompanied by recitations of verses by Dante, Baudelaire, Plato, Verne, Mallarmé and Shelley.

Thus, among the stalactites and damp tunnels of Cantus Umbrarum, one can stumble upon the arcane mysteries of "Mirror of Shades" (with spoken-word passages in French) and the sweet clarinets of "A Mineral Light in the Subterranean Sky", be shaken by the explosion of "The Deep Music of a Rolling World", or be entranced by the lunar landscapes of "Silent Souls". The final line of Dante's "Inferno" ("e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle") is instead evoked when listening to "Farewell to Darkness", representing the resurfacing to the surface, immediately followed by "A Musical Map of the Underworld", the final two-part symphony recorded live inside the caves.

The following Caryotype (2001) is an electronic symphony in eleven movements, poised between the experiments of early Klaus Schulze and the metaphysical journeys of Steve Roach. This time the research shifts to the human genome project, moving between tribal percussion ("Serge P"), spatial atmospheres ("Robert H", "Leonie A"), classical grandeur ("Alfred H") and symphonic odes ("Pierre J"). Malibu's project, meanwhile, is a collection of ambient, minimalist pieces for strings and winds.

"Our current goal," explains Christian Wittman, "is to combine the improvisations of our early work with an even more technological approach: digital multi-track recordings, huge sound libraries, mixing, editing, and so on. But without ever forgetting the 'human' aspect. Lightwave's trademark, in fact, has always been the attempt to make machines interact with the human element, through acoustic instruments. Deregnaucourt's violin contribution is fundamental in this sense."

A natural evolution and culmination of the earlier Cantus Umbrarum and Caryotype, Bleue Comme Une Orange (2004) is a work of contemporary art music, the music of our times. Whether it will be called classical is for posterity to decide. In this sense, the use of electronics shifts: from a primal choice and value in itself to one instrument among others, from a stylistic choice on which to build the composition to a vehicle for it, from an end to a means.

Fourteen tracks in which their "electronic lutherie", to use Lightwave's own felicitous phrase, forms the backdrop for and interacts with strings, piano, clarinet and winds; fourteen tracks in which drones, hisses, concrete noises and otherworldly chords outline a grand fresco featuring unsettling pan-ethnic flutes ("Dark Turquoise"), avant-garde strings ("Blue Tango"), clarinets ("Ivoire"), the trumpet of Jon Hassell on "Huang/Hong", "Chocolat Blue Pale" or "Hei/Bai", digital holograms of ambient jazz, and piano passages full of longing in the vein of Satie ("Sandy Blue"). This is futuristic music with ancient reverberations, intimately psychedelic, as refined and elite as it is primal in its intelligibility, ambient in texture yet at the same time vibrant with grand feats of ingenuity. The slow, diaphanous and inexorable electronic machinery merges with an aloof, estranging chamber-music sensibility.

Fourteen dark, spectral tracks, far removed from any dissonant, spontaneist or noise-based drift, and at the same time the antithesis of any minimalist logic. Every note, chord and sequence carries within it a sense of completeness, and every section glows with the value and existential reverberation of creation itself; every part is complete in itself, is truth in itself within us, spectators of cosmic micro-dramas and at the same time, in some way, active agents in overloading them with meaning. The music of Bleue Comme Une Orange is an implosion into the subject: rarely has one felt so clearly how music finds its true purpose in reverberating within the listener's consciousness, where every note opens curtains onto unexplored sensations, memories, inexpressible movements of the soul, correspondences, emotional symmetries. This record is the highest point in Lightwave's artistic vision, a point of no return, a gaze into the abyss where echoes of Brian Eno, Miles Davis, Jon Hassell, Rachel's, Steve Roach, Harold Budd and Stars Of The Lid all converge.

Lightwave's latest releases:

– A compilation released on Glacial Movements.

– An unreleased 50-minute mix made in 2005 for a web radio station: it can be listened to at: http://www.solenopole.org/mixlightwave.htm

* Contributions by Michele Chiusi ("Bleue Comme Une Orange")

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