1. How do you regard your working method during the last 10 years?

One should draw a distinction between the working method itself and the technical and human context of our music. Since the beginning, Lightwave had several line-up and used different kinds of technology. We don't work exactly in the same way using only analogic modular equipments or computers and digital synthesizers, or working as a trio, a duo or a quattuor of musicians... During all these years, Christoph and me, we went deeper and deeper into our musical work, into our approach of electronic instruments and music. We developped our own sound libraries and our own composition technics, our own sonic universe. We are lucky enough, because our individual approaches can fit together in a quite organic way, and we can also accept strong creative inputs from guest musicians or long-term collaborators. Paul Haslinger helped us to develop the use of computers and of digital technology. We worked also together for the mixing and the production of Mundus Subterraneus. Our current challenge is to combine together the improvisation and intuition of the early steps of Lightwave with a more technological approach - multi-track digital recording, editing, mixing... Since a few years we started a collaboration with Jacques Derégnaucourt (violin, electronics, voice), and this acoustic component opens a lot of new perspectives to our music.

2. In your compositions, you alternate serene and neo-classical polyphonic passages with sequenced fragments and electronic atmospheres. Could you comment on this ?

One of our main concerns is to avoid linearity, and to create a kind of musical journey, with its development and its steps through various landscapes. One could say that most of Lightwave music is the exploration of possible landscapes, and the mirror of various feelings and memories. We like to create a kind of natural evolution of colors, textures and materials, and to lead the listener through various steps of consciousness and sensitiveness. The listener plays an important part. We provide him with a soundtrack. He has to create his own movie, to write his own storyboard. An ever-changing musical composition helps the listener to build up the plot of his musical journey. On the other hand, this diversity of climates reflect the fact that Lightwave is not a new age band, not a Berlin-school oriented band, not an electro-acoustic band. We are somewhere in-between or beyond this categories, since we are mixing many languages and musical trends in order to create our own style and our own aesthetic.

3. On 25th October 1986, you took part in a unique event...

Actually we played several concerts on Radio Ici and Maintenant. Each time, we moved the whole equipment of our studio. The concept was to create a very secure technological set-up, with an intimate and quiet atmosphere, and to play live for thousands of listeners in the Paris area during a whole night. All the music was improvised, and the listeners called the radio during the short breaks between the live sessions, and we had a dialogue with them. Quite fascinating ! People who listen at live electronic music at 3:00, 4:00 or 5:00 AM are quite special folks. Around 5:00 AM, people called us from their work, for example bakers !
For another performance in the same radio station, we started playing during the afternoon. It was the "première" of "Les Cités analogues", and we created a show with a dance compagny. We were playing live in the radio studio, and hundred of people came in front of the Centre Georges Pompidou Center, with their FM receivers, their own radio and sound systems. So we gave an incredible concert, with hundred of little loudspeakers, each of them with different volume equalization and sonic color... The dancers performed in the middle of this audience....

4. is Bruno Heuze still collaborating with you ?

No, but we are still in touch and very good friends. He makes his own music (and released a CD, "Eurasie" a few years ago). As far as we know, he is working now on a new band project.

5. What has it meant to you to be able to make two records based on the memory of two important figures related with science and mysticism such as Tycho Brahe and Athanasius Kircher?

These two concept albums draw their inspiration from figures of the past, from great names of European culture. We wanted to avoid the average cosmic and science fiction imagery linked to space music. Instead, we choose some fascinating figures, between the ancient and the modern, between science and imagination, between rationality and fantasy. Tycho Brahe had a strong appeal, with this observations of the sky at the naked eye, and his attempt to record and interpret the visible movements of the stars. Athanasius Kircher was an encyclopaedic scholar, fond of occultism and oriental studies, and his "Mundus Subterraneus" is a very strange work, mixing alchemy, ancient authorities and pure speculations. Tycho and Kircher provided us with a specific mood for the music, and gave us a global tuning, an aesthetic frame. We tried to explore their imaginary and intellectual universe.

6. In Mundus Subterraneus, you have managed to keep a balance between electro-acoustic and concrete music integrating voices and a string quartet improvising in the studio. How important is improvisation to you?

Until now, improvistion always played an important part in our music. We have recorded many pieces composed on sequencers and computers, but few of them has been released yet, since we prefer the pieces composed and played live, interacting together in the studio. This is a collective way to create music: first choosing sounds, colors, effects, and adjusting them to what the others are using. Then, playing to add colors, space and shapes to the music as the others play it, listening carefully at the mood, at the feeling of the piece, and adding something to this piece in order to make it more efficient, more beautiful. It is strange, because most of the pieces of Tycho and Mundus were really played live, at least the basic tracks. Then, we recorded some additional tracks and sound effects and, for Mundus, Paul Haslinger added in Los Angeles his own tracks. But even at this step, there is improvisation. Our music is open and definite enough to give landmarks, to suggest directions, and to trigger the creativity. Paul's tracks were recorded without overdub, he had immediately the right idea and the right feeling. So one could say that our music is composed, but not really planned. The composition is linked to the performance, in the same way as jazz musicians are able to play together, as soon as they defined the rules of the game. We are trying, for our new projects, to mix this improvisation technic with some more structured patterns, with musical outlines. But we want to keep a strong live emphasis.

7. Do you still use analog and modular synthesizers ? Could you list the instruments used in the following works...

We kept all the modular analogic equipment from our beginning, and we still use it. We sampled many of these sounds, and this allows us to play with impressive sound libraries. We used also digital synthesizers and samplers, and we program ourselves all the sounds with computers and special softwares. Actually the instruments themselves are not so important, and we focus mainly on the sounds libraries: it is quite often impossible to recognize the source of a sound and we try to get typical analogic sounds from digital synthesizers programmed in a specific way. On the other hand, we made samples of big modular systems, with digital effects, reverse reverbs and so on, and the result is sometimes a kind of weird mixture.

8. When listening to your music one feels the actual listening to be a creative activity in which images are constantly being renewed.

Yes, you are right. This is a reason why sometimes people hate our music. Let me give you a funny example. A new age reviewer in a new age american magazine wrote a bad review of Mundus: "The only image I come up with for the first cut is that of being drawn and quartered... and I am the victim. A masterful image to be sure, but I hurt all over. I bailed out on this dark space and didn't stay for tea. (And just try and make me.. so there !). Oops, should I go into therapy?" The answer is probably: yes ! On the other hand, many listeners have positive images, and go through landscapes, colors, spaces, textures and feelings. Our music is like a screen. If one doesn't involve oneself, the screen remains black. This is not easy listening music, but one has to be a creative listener, and to bring his or her own sensitivity to the music. Still today, some of our pieces create very powerful feelings and moods, and we go through the same state of mind we had when we played in the studio. We consider such pieces to be fully achieved.

9. The "Grande Parade de Rimbaud" was a concert performed during 24 hours...

Hector Zazou was the musical leader of this small "musique de chambre" band. We had just finished the recording of his album "Sahara Blue" (and Lightwave played an incredible improvised studio session with Ryuichi Sakamoto (piano and prepared piano), which gave the basic tracks of several pieces of the album). Renaud Pion (wind instruments), Kent Condon (guitar and electronic treatments) and Christian Lechevretel (trumpet and electronics) are like us close friends and collaborators of Hector Zazou, and we had a lot of fun playing together for 24 hours. We had general scales and tunings, some rythmic patterns, but most of the music was improvised. During the late night and the early morning, the audience was sleeping in the hall and our music was just bringing them to sleep and dreams: hypnotical and minimal climates, floating drones, and a very special concentration from all the musicians, on the edge of sleep. It was really a magical experience, and very early in the morning, a singer went on stage and improvised with us... We were so focussed on the music that we didn't realize immediately that there was a voice ! All this 24 hours concert was recorded on DAT by our sound engineer. I never listened at the tapes, but he told us there were really some great parts... Perhaps one day, we will release a best of ?

10. The Nice concerts

It was a crazy experience as well. We move one more time all the Lightwave studio within this historical Observatory, a very beautiful place, with a huge telescope. We spent almost one week in this place, building up all our set up, and then playing for hours in rehearsals. We had a quadriphonic sound system and some interesting lights and computer graphics. We played two concerts, the first of them in presence of many composers, like Morton Subotnik and Joan La Barbara, and Redolfi himself, who is a good friend of us. We had prepared this concert with a precise succession of pieces and climates, and we had a backing tape to control the general timing and add sound effects impossible to play live. The funny fact is that, during the second concert, we decided to stop this backing tape and to improvise during most of the set. The result was far better than the first show, and luckily enough, the Manca team recorded this concert from the mixing desk and with an artifical head. We edited the tape, mixed it with Paul Haslinger in Los Angeles, and it will be released in a few weeks by the french record compagny MSI, under the tile "Uranography. Live at the Nice Observatory". This is a good overview of our live music in 1993, and there is even a first live version of "Sonnenstürme", a piece that was deeply reshaped by Jacques Derégnaucourt and Paul Haslinger during the Mundus Subterraneus sessions.

11. New shows and record planned for 1996

We are very busy, and we have several projects. We have finished a very special installation project in Germany, for an international exhibition of contemporary art, in Oberhausen (between Düsseldorf and Essen), in a huge Gasometer which is now used for cultural projects. Its height is 100 meters. Its width is 40 meters. We worked with two french artists, Anne and Patrick Poirier (sculptors and architects), who created "MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS": the ground level of the Gasometer was filled with water. In the middle, Anne and Patrick created huge islands with miniature landscapes and buildings, small human figures, trains, and so on. The visitors are around the pool, and can look at the landscape through 24 telescopes. Each telescope is linked to a special electronic system, and triggers music from 12 CD-R we recorded especially for this event. Each CD has 40 tracks of sounds, musical themes, and voices. The result is that the visitors are triggering a kind of 12 tracks digital recorder and are creating an ever changing and random music, with thousand and thousand different combinations. We created all the musical tracks in such a way they can always be combined and mixed together. The great opening of this exhibition was may 17, and there were nearly 2000 people within the Gazometer during the evening... The interactive installation was great and the music and the sound were very spectacular. We have a 20 minutes CD, "In der Unterwelt" released in the catalogue of the Exhibition (7000 copies) and available also as a digipack-collector limited edition (3000 copies we are distributing ourselves).

On july 12, we will play a live concert in the Gasometer of Oberhausen, in the upper part (90 meters height, a natural reverberation of 40 seconds !). We will have two special guests: Susan Belling (soprano voice) and Jacques Derégnaucourt (violin, voice, electronics). We will record all the rehearsals and the concert itself, with the acoustic of the Gasometer, and we hope to release a CD from this concert.

In November, we will play at the Festival "38e Rugissants" in the Grenoble area in France. We will move all our studio in a very scenic subterranean cave, with a fantastic subterranean lake. We will create another interactive sound installations along this 350 meters long cave, and give 12 concerts (4 days), on the edge of the lake. The project is called "Music of shades". We are planning a special CD for the Festival.

We are also working on a new concept album, dedicated to the american astronomer "Percival Lowell" who discovered the canals on Mars at the end of the XIX c. This is so far the most ambitious of Lightwave studio projects, since it will be a kind of opera. We started the recording sessions with Susan Belling (soprano voice). Jacques Derégnaucourt will be involved too, and we will have other special guests (David Darling for the cello parts, Renaud Pion for wind instruments...). We are very excited with this project...

Christian Wittman