Part 2

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music?

Basically, music demands sincerity. That is not something you always do in your daily life. Being social requests being polite. In music you can be excessive, rude, or … totally silent.

The other thing that making music brings to me is time. There is never time to spend on anything, and even less to focus. I do these things when I compose and record.

My approach to music is like an ideal case for my approach of life in general: a balance between “plan, do, check, act” and “act with and react to the irruption of intuition and uncontrolled elements”.

If music is a language, what can we communicate with it? How do you deal with misunderstandings?

If a language is a system of communication, “communication” meaning transmission of a given information from entity A to entity B, then music definitely is not a language.

Music is in the ear of the beholder, I’d say. We can’t even agree on what is music and what is not, how could it be a language?

Misunderstandings? I love’em. They tell us something, unexpected at times. And sometimes you just expect them.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?  

Oh! By losing track of the process of making music. The process involves a lot of preparation and notation, sometimes very elaborate composition notes and ideas, and also writing words for songs. And having a general structure in mind. That all goes against sincerity which is mandatory to succeed to make music happen, I think.

Hence, when sincerity applies to the process, surprise comes immediately. The challenge is to let it come despite all the hard work and mastered complexity that I have established. Or even better, together with it. If that works, then the surprise doubles.

The only downside to all this is that afterwards I barely remember how it happened...

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

For me they are totally musical. Music is everywhere. As I am typing this, there is silence around, except for the keys that I hit (a bit sharply I must say), and for two or three very high and dimmed frequencies (where do those come from?). And the soft reverberation of the room. What I write are the words to this music.

Sounds that I had - I have - a moving experience with? Walking in the forest, birds, trees, breeze. Waves by the beach of course, but also water in all its forms (even from the tap!).

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in algorithms, and data. But already at the time of Plato, arithmetic, geometry, and music were considered closely connected. How do you see that connection yourself? What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

I made studies of mathematics, before embracing a career in geophysics and ending as this chit-chatter you read from.

Mathematics are beautiful and a great, “classic” part of music is built on mathematics. Bach obviously comes to mind immediately, and on a more current standpoint we can quote Steve Reich, for example. Two composers that have a very high impact on me, mathematically speaking. And the part of intuition and even irrationality is great in mathematics too. Maybe advanced mathematicians and musicians perceive the same thing.

I remember Markus Reuter saying that music for him was not about notes and sound, but rather some internal organisation process, so in that sense both worlds are very close, I think.

If we can say that the sound of forest, with birds singing and breeze in the trees, can be music to our ears, can we say it is mathematics too? Well, maybe some mathematics that are so much ahead of us that we can’t perceive.

In all this I obviously do not refer to numbers at all, those are much too restrictive to describe music … or mathematics.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

Probably. But as we know the greatest lesson of life is life itself, so just I live through it and it changes me and changes the music I am able to channel.

Can music change us, or the world? Well, there is a French saying “la musique adoucit les moeurs”, meaning it brings people together. Would we have this interview without the music? That’s enough for me, and that is a lot.

I could add: since music is beyond language, it authorises all sorts of discussions and interactions on what it’s all about, that is just great. And, as I said: music gives me hope, and faith in something beyond our grasp. If any lesson, that would be humility.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

I understand the notion of ultimate delight. Listening to music can be like having a trip on drugs. But it can’t be permanent, otherwise we would just end up being all hermits, each on his own mountain of sounds.

We are social animals, and I think beyond music, or in parallel to music maybe, the ultimate delight of life is to connect to each other. The older I get, the more I value silence. But it is true I try to listen to music everywhere, thanks to those wonderful ear pods and cell phones. I am now writing in “silence”.

You can close your eyes, more difficult to close your ears completely though.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Well, it is and it isn’t. It is not what you make, it is rather how you make it, e.g. the process and the experience you live through.

Then of course music can last a bit more time (even after the concert) and/or can reach more people at the same time.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

I am very excited by what AI would bring to music (and to life in general). I am not afraid of new things. I am afraid of a kind of “devolution” though, that we see happening more and more, this way of “unique thought” that submerges the world and the correlative waves that break in foam of all sorts of extremisms. But this will pass, I believe.

The biggest development in recent years for music is that making it has become much more accessible to many of us, and I am the living proof of that. With my lack of proficiency in any instrument I would never have thought possible to issue such elaborate and far-reaching pieces like Unquiet Music Ltd’s first album In the name of…, which combines concrete music, electronics, serial-minimalism, progressive rock, wild improvisation, ambient and spoken music, contemporary choir and … forest sounds.

I couldn’t have realized this without a computer, although I had it dreamt long before.

Another aspect of this is that internet allows all musicians (and listeners!) of the world to connect. That opens ways to unimaginable collaborations, that is so great.

I hope that this movement will continue and unfold; finally we may all end up being musicians and listening to the music filtering through the inside as much as the music hitting from the outside. I trust we will not be overwhelmed by the inside, or by the outside “norm”. There will be an adequate balance, so bring on the technology and innovation!

Peter Gabriel once said something like that about human rights: protests, philosophies and great ideas certainly help to fight injustice, but it’s the technology that eventually allowed a breakthrough – videos, filming, bringing injustices to light. Human Rights Watch.