Lightwave

Astronomy is the poetry of the skies: this is the invitation with which Lightwave welcome us into the celestial visions of “Tycho Brahé”. Drawing on the studies of the Danish astronomer who lived in Denmark in the second half of the 1500s, the French ensemble has reinvented cosmic and ambient music in a learned format, bringing to the genre the sensibility of contemporary avant-garde and a compositional method as solid as it is profound. Lightwave's music is meta-creation or, more simply, meditation: it has no subject of its own, but inherits the findings provided by astronomy, mathematics and science in order to reflect on its own inspirations, maintaining an impeccable balance between a respectful reading of the instruments and emotional catharsis.

“Tycho Brahé”, specifically, is one of the most spectacular manifestations of the concept of the sublime in music. Faced with the naked-eye observation of the stars, man feels small, powerless, overwhelmed. Lightwave's lyrical descriptivism gathers together the sense of distance and human bewilderment before the ungraspable infinity of the cosmos.

And so “Uraniborg” teleports knowledge into an enormous astronomical observatory; through overlapping chromatic clusters (borrowed from the neo-avant-garde style of Gyorgy Ligeti), the electronics reach particular states of stillness, becoming the ideal soundtrack for observing the position of the stars.

“Mapping The Sky” opens up new sonic vistas, with soft Erik Satie-like piano lines layered over an oscillating atmospheric bed, halfway between dream and the anticipation of stellar trajectories.

The timbral qualities that define Lightwave's art emerge in all their evocative power in the sidereal grooves of “Cathedral”. Wittman, Harbonnier and Haslinger's dedication to sound design carves out a place where the sense of openness becomes intimate. “Fuga Stellarum”, then, underlines the turning of chords around interrupted paths, imprinting cosmic shipwreck onto the listener's mind. Right after, the scattered frequencies of “Virtual Mechanics” create cold intervals of emptiness, rethinking space exploration from scratch, no longer boundless and sensationalist as in the past.

Lightwave's is electronic chamber music that overturns the tonal coordinates that were in vogue with the German cosmic couriers (Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream), restoring the apparatus of musique concrète and the electroacoustic landscapes of ambient music, as in the marvellous “The Art Of Clockmaskers”. Jacques Deregnaucourt's violin and piano steal the scene in the miniature soundtrack of “Tycho On The Moon”, an account of a mysterious, hallucinated lunar journey at the center of the imagination. Contemporary music and new-age instead are reborn within the melodic weave of “Apogee”, shortly before the synthetic signals of world music in “Hymn For The Guide Of Astronomers” bring the contemplation to an end.

The depth and erudition that emerge from “Tycho Brahé” and the subsequent “Mundus Subterraneus” (the manifesto of their “subterranean music”) truly have few equals in the history of popular music. With these masterpieces, Lightwave wrote pages in which scientific and philosophical themes manage to enter art's aesthetic landscape with no conflicts to resolve.

Ride the wave of great music

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26/10/2007