Un Rêve Nu / Releases

Usually, I’m not too keen on lifting the hood and giving a guided tour to explain how an artistic mechanism works. It’s a bit like explaining a joke — if it needs a manual, maybe it’s missing something. But here, I think it’s worth putting words to the process — if only to shed some light on this very particular approach, and perhaps help with understanding (if not appreciating) the result.

First off — not the most important part, but worth mentioning — the main constraint was to use electric guitars only, and nothing but electric guitars. That’s essentially (with one exception) all you hear here, with very few effects — though at times, many layers, offsets, entanglements, and intricate overlaps.

More importantly, most of the pieces here were not conceived or composed as music per se (however abstract music might be), but rather as minimalist 4D landscapes. Think of it as a kind of hyper-box (or hypercube), where the extra dimension is time — not as something flowing, but as a spatial arrangement of sonic masses, grains, and textures. I know, it’s hard to picture, and I myself struggle to articulate what I imagined. I had in mind these little 4D boxes — (hyper)dioramas scattered with static textures or blocks of sound.

The next step was to map this — which, at that stage, existed only in my mind — onto paper (2D, of course), while still trying to avoid representing time as linear flow (so, no traditional score). Finally came the challenge of translating it all using the instrument, with the help of a basic sound editor (in this case, the simple but effective Audacity). I hope that with these few notes, some of the pieces (not all tracks on this recording followed this process — some used a much more conventional approach) might be listened to and appreciated from a perspective other than that of “music” in the usual sense.

And finally — it was important for me to do everything from A to Z (from conception to editing)... In short, a space of play — and of self. (in French: un espace de je et de jeu)