B i o g r a p h y       

Music for Observatories, Caves and Gasometers


Concerts were always an important part of Lightwave's activity. Playing
live on stage was a constant training, and a challenge for creativity.
Along the years, however, we felt some frustrations with the specific
constraints of playing electronic music in conventional theaters. Playing
keyboards, plugging and unplugging patches of the modular synthesizers,
controlling computers, loading sound libraries in the MIDI synthetizers at
various stages of the concert, taking care of the mixing and eventually of
the recording of the concert itself do not allow for attractive and scenic
attitudes on stage. During most of Lightwave early concerts, there was a
dark stage, with blue and green lights, and three guys totally surrounded
by huge modular systems and keyboards, deeply focused on the music. Light
projections, dance on stage, and sometimes laser shows created some stage
animation.

We were looking for other concepts of live performances, open to a wider
audience than the hard-core electronic fans we met in various French and
English festivals. Our concert at the Astronomical Observatory in Nice
in November 1993 was a first step into this direction. The Manca New
Music Festival had (and still has) the reputation of bringing electronic
and new musics in unusual places, such as swimming pools, beaches, gardens,
museums etc. A new audience was reached, that would never enter an Academic
Concert hall for listening at contemporary music. For our two concerts in
Nice, the old Astronomical Observatory of Garnier and Gustave Eiffel was
open to the audience. Moreover, beach mattresses were arranged on the
ground and the listeners just laid down, looking from the ground at the
wonderful coupole and at the huge telescope. The music started gently in
the dark, and a sophisticated light show enluminated the coupole during the
entire performance.

The Oberhausen Gasometer installation fully developed this concept of
performances in unusual places (gallery). Christian met French artists
Anne and Patrick Poirier in Los Angeles at the Getty Center and they
became great friends. They had previously been commissioned for a special
installation in the Oberhausen Gasometer, near Dusseldorf in Germany. At
the time, Christian was involved in the production of "Mundus Subterraneus"
with Paul Haslinger. The concept of "Mundus" had a strong appeal for
Anne and Patrick, and they proposed us to join them in order to create a
concrete, physical "Mundus Subterraneus" on the ground level of the
Gasometer. This installation was sponsored by German industrial companies,
and the project was crazy (but we are French, right?).

An artificial pool was created within the gasometer, and the river near by
was used to fill in the pool through a pump system. An archipelago of dark
islands was created at the center of the artificial lake (diameter: 30
meters). And on the islands, hundred of small buildings, human figures,
miniature cars, tiny planes, spaceship models, and even a small electric
train were disposed. The entire scene was very dark, covered with coal
dust, half-burned and half destroyed, as a real land after a bombing or
some major industrial disaster. Artifical smoke was floating around the
islands. All around the pool, small telescopes, fixed on supports, were
oriented toward the islands, at the center of the pool. And through the
telescopes, the small figures, buildings, cars, and so on, were seen as if
they were full scale.

The telescopes, when moved by the viewers, triggered a track of music.
Some were only a few seconds or a minute long. Each of the 24 telescopes
was linked to a special multitrack sound system, with twelve different
CD-Rs, each of them containing 80 different tracks of music. As a result,
the sound environment of the installation evolved and changed during sixth
months, according to the way people moved the telescopes. All the tracks of
music had been conceived to be mixed together and create interesting
events, whatever the combination may be.

This spectacular sound installation was visited by nearly 100,000 people.
Lightwave music would have never reached such a wide audience in a
conventional concert setting. The CD "In der Unterwelt "offers a
suggestive sample of what happened within the Oberhausen Gasometer 
for six months.

The Choranche caves installation adapted the same technical and
artistic concept to a huge subterranean site. This time there were no
telescopes, but a sound system was employed along two long galleries, and
within two scenic subterranean spaces, with lake, waterfalls and rivers.
Over the course of a week, every two hours a group of 100 or more people
was guided by professional speleologists through the whole subterranean
site. When they entered the cave, everything was in the dark. All the
visitors wore protection helmets, with headlights. As they moved their
heads back and forth from one side to the other, they created a fantastic
lightshow on the huge roof and thousands of stalactites in the cave.

The audience was then divided into two groups, each of them exploring a
gallery to its end, then coming back, meeting the other group, and starting
the exploration of the other gallery. Their walk was illuminated by blue
and green lights hidden behind the rocks. The music followed each group
during its walk in each gallery, and then they met on the shore of the
lake, the music from the two galleries was reuniting and creating a wide
quadriphonic soundscape.

The music of "Cantus Umbrarum" was conceived as a musical
composition, moving automatically and slowly along the galleries, from one
loudspeaker to the other, at the rhythm of the walk of the visitors. Special
sound effects sometimes started at the very end of a gallery, and moved
down very quickly through all the loudspeakers to its other end, such as
rolling rocks or flood noises. Voices were heard at various points in the
galleries. Loudpeakers were hidden behind rocks and created a mysterious
acoustic space... The music was mixed with the cave's natural noises in a
perfect manner.

"Cantus Umbrarum" was enjoyed by thousand of visitors who discovered
electronic music for the first time. We played short live concerts at the
end of the visits. School classes went with their teachers, and after the
walk in the cave, we met them and answered all their questions about
electronic instruments and music. "Cantus" is the most difficult project
we've ever achieved, on a technical level. Mixing the multichannel sound
recordings into a stereo tape was a difficult challenge too. This stereo
version is released by Horizon Music.