Going underground

LIGHTWAVE (Christian Wittman • Christoph Harbonnier)

Renowned French electro-acoustic ensemble Lightwave must have a penchant for unusual recording locations – their latest album, Cantus Umbrarum, was composed for a sound installation performance within the subterranean Choranche Caves of the Vercors Mountains in France! JONATHAN MILLER joins Christian Wittman and Christoph Harbonnier for a fascinating musical journey into the depths of the unknown…

“Could you imagine mixing a strudel cake with Snapple iced tea and French red wine? That’s Lightwave!” So addresses Christian Wittman, co-founder of, and principal spokesperson for, the renowned French electro-acoustic ensemble he cites, currently centred round a duo of Wittman and long-standing colleague Christoph Harbonnier, plus various ancillary guest musicians: LightWeb, The Official Lightwave Homepage (www.hmnetwork.com/lightweb/), lists 13 such individuals – some well-known; others, not so – as being part of the so-called Lightwave tribe. But what on earth is Wittman talking about here? Well, to appreciate the subtleties of his humorous opener, a little Lightwave history should possibly constitute this musical menu’s ‘apéritif’…

The roots of Lightwave, the group, can be traced back to 1984, when Wittman teamed up with fellow Parisian Serge Leroy to positively channel their mutual appreciation of electronic music into Crystal Lake, an independent, non-profit organisation devoted to its promotion through a world-wide mail order service and accompanying magazine. Armed with a mightily impressive Roland System 700 modular system, Leroy was already taking tentative electronic musical steps himself, a move that was far from being lost on Wittman, who subsequently leapt at an opportunity to buy a vintage, second-hand ARP 2600 synthesizer at a rather knock-down price, despite a hitherto lack of keyboard-playing experience.

And there’s the rub: while undeniably musical, albeit in the right hands, such instruments are also educational; unless you physically patch the various sound generating components (or modules) of a System 700 together, it’s simply not going to make a noise, musical or otherwise – hence the modular system terminology. For Leroy and Wittman, it was exactly this abundance of knobs and sliders at their immediate disposal that excited them – the seemingly endless possibilities for sound sculpting, in other words, rather than playing the actual keys. Clearly, modular synthesizers ideally lend themselves to musical experimentation and this formed the basis of the ongoing project that became known as Lightwave. Little wonder, then, that they chose to christen their 1987 cassette-based recording debut Modular Experiment, Christoph Harbonnier having joined the dynamic electronic duo in 1985.

So what’s the ‘culinary’ significance of Wittman’s introduction? Well, in the interim period, Lady Luck would unexpectedly shine upon the intrepid trio and ultimately guide them from the sideline and into the recording limelight. A few months after the concerts Tangerine Dream played in Paris in 1986, Lightwave had dinner in Paris with new recruit Paul Haslinger, an Austrian (now residing in Los Angeles) – hence Wittman’s tongue-in-cheek “strudel cake” and “Snapple iced tea” references – fresh out of the prestigious Academy of Music in Vienna and into the Tangerine Dream fold, seemingly a world away from Lightwave’s humble beginnings. Lightwave played Haslinger some of their fledgling recordings, and his response was very encouraging.

As Wittman concurs: “We had various meetings afterwards, and a real friendship grew up, with mutual respect and trust. After he left Tangerine Dream, Paul spent some time in Paris and he became aware of our musical activity. Obviously, we shared a few values and basic conceptions about what electronic music is about, about the properties of French tarte tatin and expresso coffee! In a very natural and casual way, we met in the Lightwave studio where we played together and recorded enough material to be convinced that something interesting was happening. Since then, we have maintained a strong connection and experienced various ways of working together: studio sessions in Paris, on stage for two concerts – in Paris and London – and mixing and production sessions in Los Angeles.”

LA confidential

In 1991 Paul Haslinger departed Tangerine Dream and mainland Europe for Hollywood’s sunnier climes in pursuit of his own studio-based dream of musical research, experiments and project developments in this moviemaker’s Mecca, yet still found time to contribute to four tracks on Lightwave’s second ‘proper’ studio album in 1994’s Tycho Brahé, an ambient and experimental work inspired by its Danish astronomer namesake, with an even greater hands-on involvement in Mundus Subterraneus, its 1995 follow-up. Indeed, it could be argued that the lengthy production of your third CD, with Haslinger at the helm, succeeded in taking Lightwave’s sound to its highest level yet – “…both musically and in terms of production,” to quote from his sleeve liner notes. Though Christoph Harbonnier, classically trained violinist Jacques Derégnaucourt and yourself were deeply involved in recording this album’s basic tracks at Les Nouvelles Musiques Électroniques (the Montreuil-based communal recording facility you co-founded with French/Algerian producer Hector Zazou) between January and July 1994, with additional tracks being recorded by Haslinger at The Assembly Room (his West Hollywood so-called ‘music and media laboratory’) between March and December 1994, an interesting development occurred in the fall of that year whereby you were granted a nine-month scholarship at the Getty Center for the History of Arts and Humanities in Los Angeles, following which Haslinger proposed producing and mixing Mundus Subterraneus. What are your memories of this experience, both musically and technically, and do you feel that being temporarily immersed in that fast-track American city lifestyle in any way affected Lightwave’s quintessential European sound on this release?

Christian Wittman (CW): Mundus Subterraneus is a very important album for Lightwave. It gives a clear overview of our musical choices, of our project and artistic personality. It is a mixture of harmony and dissonance; of lyricism and sound experimentation; of concept and improvisation. This music went beyond the usual borders between musical genres, such as musique concrète, electro-acoustic music, ambient music or whatever. This music has its inner logic and necessity, and the most amazing fact is that it was composed and played live, through the interaction of musicians recorded live on a digital multitrack. For the first time, then, Lightwave achieved its goal – that is, using electronic instruments within the framework of a chamber music ensemble, playing together, interacting together, choosing which sound to load from the computer and how to play it in real time. We always tried to minimise the technical mediation between artistic intent and its result – that is, to build up the same flexibility with electronic instruments as with acoustic instruments. Even the mixing and production step was left open to allow for intuition, real-time choices and actions.

In a striking way, during the Los Angeles production phase of Mundus… Paul behaved in exactly the same way as us. The mood, the structure of the compositions provided guidelines for the production step, and when Paul had to record additional tracks, he made the right decisions at the right time. This means that our music has a kind of inner logic and necessity, its own rules and architecture, and that the musicians have to collaborate in the development of a common idea. On this musical level, we shared our experiences and expertise.

Let’s say that Lightwave is putting research and experimentation at the forefront. We can spend weeks developing our sound libraries, sampling our analogue modular systems and editing these samples in sophisticated programs, and recording musical ideas and atmospheres. We have total freedom to record, play and release whatever music we choose. We have developed our own personality and trademark, and go deeper and deeper into the directions we defined. We also like to experiment with new directions, whereas Paul is more ‘project-oriented’, with defined time schedules and creative pressures, sometimes, as well. Film music in Hollywood is a well-defined genre, with its own rules, language and tools, and you cannot do whatever you want. So the collaboration between Lightwave and Paul Haslinger is a kind of cultural encounter between French artistic craziness; Austrian rigour, where craziness plays its part; American pragmatism and Californian lifestyle – their coffee is improving! On a technical level, it is always possible to find common working methods between us, despite the fact that Lightwave is a team of craftsmen and ‘do-it-yourself’ enthusiasts, and Paul is a MIDI and computer guru, working with the most up-to-date technologies.

For Malibu, a work-in-progress, Paul proposed a particular harmonic scale, used by classical composer Scriabine, with a very limited choice of notes, and we recorded pieces fitting into this minimalist frame. Caryotype, our forthcoming album, to be released by Radio France, features various studio material. Among them, four pieces produced by Paul, who also overdubbed some music tracks. So we have a very flexible collaboration frame, and we are currently discussing new concepts, such as exchanging files through the Internet and offering a specific Lightwave sound design for Paul’s projects in Hollywood.

Christoph Harbonnier (CH): From the beginning, it was always clear that Lightwave and Paul had their own agenda and projects, and that we are doing our best to build up collaboration frames without any pressure. This fits in well with our conception of Lightwave as an open and variable structure, involving a network of creative partners, such as visual artists, technicians and musicians.

Parisian nachtmusik

There would appear to be several key breakthrough points in Lightwave’s own sonically rich history, one of which is clearly the ‘accidental’ recording of the Nachtmusik title track on that special night of 14 through to 15 May 1989. Here producer/sound engineer Michel Geiss, arguably most well-known for his long-term pioneering involvement with leading French export Jean-Michel Jarre, was responsible for the final digital mixing and mastering of this, your debut album, released in 1990 on the German Erdenklang label. Geiss has since become a long-term adviser to Lightwave, too, pre-mastering or mastering nearly all your subsequent releases – not forgetting, of course, his considerable technical expertise in conceiving and setting up the complicated sound systems for your sound installations in the Oberhausen Gasometer in Germany and Choranche Caves in France. Can you reveal a little more about how this important working relationship began and subsequently developed?

CW: Our friendship with Michel relies on several factors, such as a common passion for analogue synthesizers – the ARP 2600 and 2500, mostly (Michel Geiss was among the first musicians to use them in France, in his collaboration with Jean-Michel Jarre); a deep interest in electronic music and technology; and shared intellectual and human concerns, ranging from ancient Egyptian history and Italian food to Asian medicine and spirituality. For us, Michel is one of the leading European experts in electronic sound and music production. As an engineer, he has a very strong technical background, and he is a musician and composer as well. He is also a top-level producer, able to understand a musical project and improve it, according to the artist’s personality and goal. Technique and treatment are not at the forefront; his philosophy is to save and enhance the original mood and feeling of a given recording. Our first album, Nachtmusik, was a live studio recording, and in the production process Michel worked mainly on equalization, minor corrections and enhancements of the original tape.

On a more general level, since the beginning, Michel gave us unexpected attention, and his interest in Lightwave was a major driving force for us. He was in charge of mastering several of our CDs. He helped us in the conception and engineering of the multi-channel sound system, used in our interactive sound installations. Patrick Pelamourgue, Jean-Michel Jarre’s main studio technician, and a very gifted man, was responsible for building these sound systems. Now Michel Geiss is involved in the Polygone Studio in Toulouse. He is no longer working with Jarre, and is a recognised freelance producer and sound engineer involved in many major French record industry productions.

Modular experiment

At the time of Nachtmusik, Lightwave’s improvised recording philosophy was still centred upon your affinity for analogue synthesizers, particularly those of a modular variety, having originally purchased a second-hand ARP 2600 during the Crystal Lake years. By the mid-’80s, you owned three such instruments, plus an impressive and unique French modular system – bought from the French composer Saint-Preux – comprising several RSF Kobol rack-mounting monosynths, plus a couple of accompanying RSF sequencers, and a multi-panelled Roland System 100M, all of which can be seen in the Nachtmusik album sleeve photographs. What was the fascination of these unwieldy, some might say, outmoded, instruments for Lightwave back then – after all, Lightwave once recorded a cassette-album entitled Modular Experiment?

CW: Synthesizers such as the ARP 2600, Korg PS-3300 and Oberheim 4-Voice were closely linked to the development of electronic music during the ’70s, along with Moog equipment. We discovered these instruments through the music of artists like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze – on their records and in their concerts – and we were indeed fascinated by the range of new sounds and effects possible. Such instruments were the nec plus ultra, and being able to buy them in France on the second-hand market was really achieving an old dream. In the early-’80s, analogue synthesizers still ruled, and modular synthesizers were supposed to offer the widest range of creative possibilities.

These instruments played an important part in Lightwave for three reasons: first, they allowed us to create a really personal sound; to define a sonic trademark. An ARP 2600 responds in a very direct way with the musician handling it. Jean-Michel Jarre, Michel Geiss, Klaus Schulze and Lightwave have all used that instrument in different ways. It reflects the musical sensitivity and personality of the player. Second, modular synthesizers introduced a random dimension to the composition process. Using such instruments live or in studio sessions was always the best way to achieve unexpected results, since any change, any move or any additional patch cord had a sonic consequence on what you were playing. Lightwave decided to include such events into the composition process and to organise music around them. Third, modular synthesizers introduced us to a new dimension in music where the keyboard was sometimes no more than a trigger device. Using knobs and sliders was the best way to play with frequencies and filters; patching was a way to create complexity, sometimes beyond any intellectual control.

A modular system is like a living organism, with its own pulse and chain of reactions. We played with them in order to create random, evolving soundscapes. Using modular synthesizers implied a very physical interplay with the machine – that is, gestures, movements, precision or approximation; mistakes and wrong connections, sometimes; and visual and geometrical patch cord patterns on the main panel of the machine.

CH: We are currently interested in virtual synthesizers that allow the user to build their own modular systems on screen. The sonic possibilities are impressive, and the user can now store all the sounds and set-up configurations on their hard-drive. With a true modular system, it is very difficult and sometimes impossible to retrieve the sounds once the cords and settings are changed. However, with these virtual synthesizers, this tactile, physical contact with the panel and knobs is no longer there. A mouse, a computer keyboard and the digital precision of software create an intellectual distance between the musician and the sounds. We are dreaming about a new kind of triggering interface, such as a tactile set of kinetic sensors that would allow live, physical interaction with, say, synthesis software running on a PowerBook G3 computer…

Performance rating

Live performance would appear to be another important aspect of Lightwave’s ongoing development. Indeed, there are some quite fascinating concert settings and experiences chronicled on your Website, like your Ici & Maintenant live FM radio performance broadcast of 1988 and your 24-hour, non-stop, improvised concert with Hector Zazou and three of his musicians in 1991, for example. Looking back, what are your memories of these crazy events, and would you say they were instrumental in the group’s dispensing with conventional on-stage performances in favour of ever more spectacular settings, like the Nice Observatory in 1993, as part of the 15th MANCA (Musiques Actuelles Nice Côte d’Azur) Festival, and beyond?

CW: Playing electronic music live is a technical challenge, as well as an artistic one. The key question is: what kind of pleasure or experience is a live performance supposed to bring to the listeners? If one considers that electronic music relies on sonic sophistication and hi-fi quality, a concert often offers a poor replica of the home audiophile experience. A jazz or rock band add a physical dimension to a live musical performance – moving on stage, interacting with the audience and sharing energy. Electronic musicians, on the other hand, are stuck behind their keyboards and screens on stage. Only playback allows stage gimmicks.

So, how and why should electronic musicians play on stage – especially instrumental, non-dance-oriented music? One possible answer is to create a sophisticated visual show, with lights, computer graphics, fireworks, lasers and dancers. We played such conventional concerts, though admittedly these were far less spectacular than Jean-Michel Jarre’s shows!

A second, more interesting, answer is to focus on the music itself, and to provide listeners with a specific live experience of the electronic sound. To a certain extent, we feel close to classical music – symphonic or chamber orchestras do not need lightshows and fireworks. Here the focus is on the music and performance, but also on the experience of sharing music with a whole audience in a concert hall. A concert is a collective experience, where the performers, the technicians and the audience create and share vibes, energy and imagination. A silent, concentrating audience plays a very important part in the creative process of the musicians on stage. We feel this concentration, and we play with it. As live performers, we prefer to have a focused audience, rather than an audience distracted by endless, repetitive gimmicks. All Lightwave’s concerts have tried to provoke a focused state of mind in the listeners, either through the presence of slow motion dancers on stage, who changed the perception of time and space, or through experiences such as the Ici & Maintenant FM concert, where we played live in the radio station’s studio and the Parisian audience gathered on the Centre Georges Pompidou piazza with their FM receivers, creating the most incredible PA system, with a lot of small and cheap loudspeakers generating a huge sound together.

CH: Until now, Lightwave concerts have always been real live performances, without computers controlling all of the music. Backing tapes have only ever been used for specific sound effects impossible to create on stage. Our concerts are a balance between structure and improvisation, and the latter always plays an important part.

On a starry, starry night

The second Lightwave concert performance of 14 November 1993 at the Nice Observatory was captured for posterity and later released as Uranography • Live At The Nice Observatory on the French MSI label in 1996. Again, what are your recollections of this exciting performance, both technical and otherwise?

CW: The MANCA Festival was a very original annual event, held in Nice, in the South of France. The artistic director was Michel Redolfi, a major French composer in the field of electronic music, well known for his underwater concerts, in swimming pools or in the sea! Each festival featured interesting events in unusual places, such as historical churches, museums or street locations, with composers like Terry Riley, Morton Subotnik, Philip Glass and musicians from the GRM. Michel Redolfi commissioned Lightwave for two live performances in an extraordinary location – the Astronomical Observatory of Nice, built by Charles Garnier and Gustav Eiffel in the 19th Century. This is a gorgeous historical monument, with an impressive telescope and a fantastic mechanism for opening the roof.

CH: We were allowed to set up all our equipment a few days before the performance and rehearse in the Observatory with the lighting and sound technicians. We had a quadraphonic PA system and played two concerts. Both were strange events. There were no seats in the Observatory, so we rented beach mattresses and deckchairs. The audience lay down, looking at the Observatory’s dome and telescope where most of the lightshow was focused. We also had computer graphics on a large screen above our set-up.

CW: The two concerts were pretty different. The first one was more ‘self-controlled’ – we put limits on our improvisation. The second was hardcore space music, because at the beginning of the show we had a technical glitch somewhere, so we had to change all the plans and structure, and improvise the whole act. As a matter of fact, it gave interesting results, and we released the recording, from the mixing desk and from an artificial head, for catching the acoustic atmosphere. Post-production of this album was made at Paul Haslinger’s studio in LA, who added some sound effects and treatments. This concert was a unique experience, because the usual relationship between performers, audience and venue was deeply altered. It was the first time that this Observatory had been opened up to the public for years, and, for most of the audience, discovering such a place during the night, with space music, a crazy set-up of old modular systems and oniric lights, was a tremendous experience.

Industrial reclamation

And MANCA leads us neatly on to Lightwave’s 1996 sound installations and performances in yet more extraordinary settings. On 12 July 1996 you premiered your so-called “Lowell electronic space opera”, another work-in-progress (dedicated to the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who discovered the canals on Mars), in a concert at the Oberhausen Gasometer in Germany, together with special guests Susan Belling – a.k.a. ‘S’Ange’, an American opera singer, whom Paul Haslinger has also collaborated with on occasion – and violinist Jacques Derégnaucourt. What is the background to this installation and how did you set about making it a technical reality?

CW: For six months, the huge Oberhausen Gasometer was transformed into a contemporary art exhibition. The event was called Ich Phoenix and sponsored by major industrial companies in the Düsseldorf area. Our friends, Anne and Patrick Poirier, were commissioned to create a huge installation on the ground floor of the Gasometer. They decided to work with us and together we conceived an installation called Mundus Subterraneus, a large island surrounded with water and hundreds of tiny houses, figures, cars, trains, trees and industrial buildings covered with black coal dust. The audience walked around the pool and 24 telescopes allowed them to discover and explore these artificial landscapes that looked like an area after heavy bombing or an atomic cataclysm.

CH: Each telescope acted as a trigger to our sound system – two racks, full of CD players, each with a different CD-R comprising 30, 40 or 50 tracks of music; some of them only a few seconds long; others a few minutes. Each CD player had its own amplifier and loudspeakers above the pool, resulting in a very spatial sound. The system could create thousands of different sound combinations, and a continuous random musical creation was kept running for six months, thanks to the 100,000 spectators who moved the telescopes and triggered the sounds.

CW: In der Unterwelt, a 20-minute CD, was released for the exhibition catalogue. It offers a pretty good sample of what was happening during those six months. We are considering the release of a full-length CD, or perhaps several CDs, offering other snapshots of this infinite composition process.

The organisers offered us a chance to play a live concert within the Gasometer, a huge space – 70 metres high, with a 25-metre circular platform and rows of seats surrounding the stage. It was a great challenge, because the place has such weird acoustic properties – echoes and a very long natural reverberation. Again, we had a quadraphonic sound system. It was the first live performance we played with the soprano singer Susan Belling. She had an HF microphone and moved freely within the Gasometer, climbing up the ladders and walking on aerial footbridges, 20 metres above us, while singing and playing with the reverb. This concert was really weird and crazy, an extreme experience! The Gasometer itself acted as a musical instrument, and its metallic architecture interacted with our music. It was a concert for synthesizers, soprano voice and violin, so-to-speak – in the biggest echo chamber in the world! Susan Belling died a few months ago; we miss her a lot…

Underworld

An arguably even more spectacular event occurred in November 1996 when, as part of the Festival 38e Rugissants, you moved your entire studio within the Choranche Caves of the Vercors Mountains, in the Grenoble area of France, and gave 12 underground concerts on the edge of a lake there over a period of four days. These concerts, and the complex interactive sound installation conceived by Michel Geiss, form the basis of your latest album, Cantus Umbrarum, the first for the Horizon Music label in America earlier this year. Indeed, you are on record as saying, “The music of the Choranche caves installation was a very difficult challenge, both artistically and technically, and we had to shift from a 12-channel mix to a stereo mix. It is a very crazy soundtrack, involving acoustic instruments – Turkish clarinet, saxophone, flute, violin – and voices – French, German, English, Italian – spoken by French theatre actors and by John Greaves, a British actor and singer. The Choranche music falls somewhere between Mundus… and Tycho…, a subterranean space opera, quite scenic and evocative. The music and the sound are very sophisticated, at least from our point of view.” What else can you reveal about this remarkable installation, the subterranean concerts and subsequent album?

CW: The Festival 38e Rugissants is also well-known for contemporary music in France. They organised the underwater concerts of Michel Redolfi in the Olympic swimming pool at Grenoble – listeners had to get into their bathing suits and jump into the water to hear the music! This is a rather unusual way to enjoy a contemporary music concert! So, when they asked us to conceive a project in the Vercors Mountains’ caves, at Choranche, we were not really surprised.

The cave has a huge subterranean space with a beautiful lake. From there, there are two 300-metre galleries, running in different directions. At the end of the second one, there is an incredible space, with waterfalls and a huge natural row of stalactites. Our basic idea was to create a musical itinerary within this cave, with a multichannel PA system all along the galleries, waterfalls and lake area. The musical concept was a kind of electronic oratorio, a descent into the underworld, mixing fragments of poems and electronic music. We worked with the professional guides in charge of the site in order to calculate the time it takes to enter the cave and walk around the lake, then split the visitors into two groups, each entering a gallery, walking to its end and back again, before meeting up with the other group and entering the other gallery.

The music played through the various loudspeakers, according to the walking pace of the visitors. When the two groups were finally reunited in the lake space, the music of the two galleries was also merged and perfectly mixed through a quadraphonic PA system. Then the music was split up again into two distinct programmes – one for each gallery – and played through the various loudspeakers along their respective lengths. The guides had to direct the visitors to make sure that they would be at a given place for pre-determined sound events – they were human synchronisation devices, so-to-speak, controlling the pace of the visitors.

CH: It was a very difficult challenge for us, as first we had to compose the music in the studio and then mix it according to this planned dynamic and moving diffusion – that is, a given composition was slowly shifting from channels one to two, then on to channels three, four, five, six and so on. At the end of both galleries, it was then replayed in a reverse direction back to channel one, with successive fade in and fade out effects on each track. We also conceived a different range of electronic sounds and frequencies, according to the ambient noise in the gallery – that is, the background sound of the subterranean rivers, which gets louder and louder nearer the waterfalls.

While walking, the visitors followed the progression of sound and music, and we also made use of the gallery space itself – sometimes, sounds were coming from the end of the gallery and were shifting very quickly from one loudspeaker to the next, like rolling stones or flood noises. Or, sometimes, echoes, voices and sound effects were heard behind or in front of the visitors, creating dramatic effects. The natural topography of the galleries and rocks hid the loudspeakers and audio cables, so the origin of the sounds and voices remained a mystery to the listeners.

CW: When the two groups of listeners met for a second time in the main lake space, we started a live performance, as an electro-acoustic quartet of violin, wind instruments and electronics. All of our equipment was on the shore of the lake. There was water everywhere; sometimes it was even cascading down from the roof of the cave, yet still our music equipment and computers were not shut down for a whole week to keep them at a constant warm temperature. Between each performance, we protected everything against the water moisture with plastic covers and flight cases. Each concert was improvised. The visitors effectively created a large part of the lightshow themselves with their miner’s lamps moving in all directions – towards the roof of the cave, towards the thousands of stalactites or towards us. In a few cases, there were school classes among the visitors, and the kids were totally fascinated by the show. After the performances, we had a debate with them, explaining our technical set-up and how we improvised our music.

The craziest event happened the day before the end of the festival. There was heavy rainfall on the entire Vercors Mountains area, and there was a flood in the cave. We were playing live, in front of 150 listeners, when the guides asked us to stop the performance, because the only natural exit of the cave was about to be flooded! So the audience had to be evacuated immediately and we had to dismantle the entire PA system, the lights and our equipment, and put them on a higher platform, out of the waters’ reach. However, the next day the water level subsided, and that morning we were able to rebuild everything and went on to play several performances during the afternoon.

New horizons

After all these exciting activities in 1996 everything seemed to go very quiet on the Lightwave front, to outsiders at least – until the release of Cantus Umbrarum on Horizon Music in 2000, that is. One is left wondering exactly what Lightwave have been up to of late, musically – earlier this year, for example, you reported, “We are working on a new studio project, in a new place, but it will take several months to be operational.” Can you fill in the gaps?

CH: As electronic musicians, and independent artists, we are lucky enough to have total creative freedom. This means we are not under pressure and can take the all time we need before releasing a new record or playing a concert. It makes no sense to release three albums a year if there is no real artistic reason or a new concept. For us, it is very important to keep experimenting with new ideas, developing our sound libraries and recording basic tracks for new compositions. In recent years, we have worked on creating a stereo version of the Choranche caves installation. This was quite a technical challenge, as we had to convert the multi-channel mix into a conventional two-track mix, which we then released as the Cantus Umbrarum CD.

CW: We started a partnership with Horizon Music in the US in 1999. For us, the main point of this is to keep our creative freedom and work with partners interested in our music. We don’t want to rely on partners who are only interested in short-term profit. We are well aware that our music does not fit into mainstream marketing categories and that it cannot be handled in an efficient way by a major company. Web technologies now allow on-line sales, and the dispersal of music and concepts to dedicated audiences. The Internet helps independent, decentralised networks, and the Lightwave project is present through various media, such as FM radio playlists, online magazine reviews, on-line record stores and the personal Web pages of fans all around the world. These people know where to search for information and get our CDs, and their support and ongoing interest is very important for us.

We also worked on the Malibu album project – we have recorded a string quartet, horn, clarinet, saxophone and flute parts alongside the basic electronic tracks, and the results, so far, are very unusual for Lightwave. We would like to release this album in 2001, but first we will be releasing our new studio album, Caryotype, on the Signatures record label, created by France Musique, the national French FM radio station devoted to classical and contemporary music. This is also a major step for us as this series will feature some of the most interesting composers of the French electronic scene, such as Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari, as well as Jacques Derégnaucourt and Renaud Pion, our friends and collaborators. Signatures is also responsible for other bold and innovative projects, such as a fascinating Radio France interview with the film director Jean-Luc Godard, a great recording of an Indian street band and a solo percussion album by Martin Saint-Pierre, which creates a trance-like mood. Signatures aims to bring contemporary music, art and field recordings of world music to a large audience. The CDs have a great design and will get heavy airplay on the FM Radio France programs, and are being distributed by the audiophile company Harmonia Mundi.

CH: Another important event for us will be our Alpha Centauri festival concert in Bussum, Netherlands, on 28 April 2001, where Rick Wakeman will be the headline act. Other artists performing there are Alquimia and two German musicians, Peter Mergener and Roedelius, both of whom have played a very important role in the history of European electronic and new musics. Lightwave’s line-up will be a trio, with Jacques Derégnaucourt as a guest musician.

CW: Finally, we have several releases planned with Horizon Music – new releases of Tycho Brahé and Mundus Subterraneus are on the way. A US release of Caryotype is being discussed and could happen in 2001. We also want to release new ‘limited edition’ material. This does not mean that we will release anything from our archives, however. A good studio session is not necessarily a good album; there is a huge gap between studio archives and a successful studio project. The relationship between an artist and their audience is built up on mutual trust. Our commitment is to only release top-quality albums we will still be comfortable with 10 years later. So far, this has always been the case.

www.hmnetwork.com/lightweb/

LIGHTWAVE STUDIO EQUIPMENT

CHRISTIAN WITTMAN: Akai S900 • ARP 2600 x3 • ARP Sequencer • Crumar Bit One • E-mu eSynth • Korg M1 • Korg Wavestation • Moog Polymoog • Roland JD-800 • Roland System 100M (16 modules) • RSF Modular System II (16 modules)

CHRISTOPH HARBONNIER: Korg PS3300 • Kurweil K2000 (with 64Mb RAM and sampling card) • Oberheim 4-Voice (modified with four external CV/Gate triggers) • RSF Kobol • RSF Polykoboll • Yamaha DX7 II

RECORDING: Alesis 16:4:2 mixer • Alesis ADAT x2 • Mackie 16:2:2 mixer • Sony ES-55 DAT • Yamaha 02R mixer (with ADAT interface x2)

MONITORING: Accuphase amplifier • Cabasse Galion 3 VTA (modified) • Davis Triphonic system

OUTBOARD: Alesis Midifex • Alesis Midiverb • Alesis Quadraverb • Ibanez digital delay • Lexicon PCM70 • Roland 350 vocoder • Roland analogue delay • Roland DEP5

MISCELLANEOUS: Kensington MIDI/CV interface • Various Apple Macintosh computers (including 500MHz PowerBook G3, 300MHz G3, PowerBook 1400 and SE30)

LIGHTWAVE • SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

Nachtmusik (Urdenklang, 1990)

Tycho Brahé (Fathom/Hearts Of Space, 1994)

Mundus Subterraneus (Fathom/Hearts Of Space, 1995)

In der Unterwelt (Plans Sonores, 1996)

Uranography • Live At The Nice Observatory (MSI, 1996)

Cantus Umbrarum (Horizon Music, 2000)

Caryotype (Signatures, 2001)