MORPHEUS MUSIC INTERVIEW - JAZZ COMPUTER.ORG

06.03.10 - on release of Life - Unfolding

I had my first guitar when I was 14, prog rock and space music were eveywhere at this time. Of course I've played in rock and roll bands at high shool :). My interest for jazz came later; it's where I discovered a completely new world for improvising, and harmonies I'd never heard about.

Some years ago, after a very long break, I decided to plug my guitar again and decided to get involved with electronic music, and going on improvising and using jazz chords and harmonies. It seemed to be actually possible to use just software and computers for electronic sounds and samples, without hardware synths. That's why I chose this name, which seemed also easy to remember and points clearly to an internet web site where the music is available.

More simplicity, less complex orchestrations, and many more atmospheres. One of my major concerns is to blend improvisation with the atmospheres and build something to be called "ambient", whatever it means regarding to people who listen to it.

I've worked for a long time on sounds and the coherence of sounds between them, and also software automation to play quite live performances which involve a lot of software synths. So I improvised and recorded a lot of things during about one year, to finally select and improve the things that could fit together on an album. I took great care of the blending of the sounds and the progress of atmospheres and tensions throughout the whole album, which can be listened to as a single track.

Very calm and floating music with sparse melodies and rhythms, rich harmonies blending together for supporting melodic improvisations mainly played on the guitar.

I do everything at home :).
My studio is made up mostly of a computer and a guitar, with a high end soundcard. I play a Levinson Blade electric guitar (an uncommon fender jazzmaster-like model), a master keyboard with lots of buttons and knobs to pilot the synths inside the computer, a foot controller, and finally two very large screens with ambient background images of wide natural landscapes. I forgot : there are also two Yamaha speakers :).

More and more, I start with the sounds, the colors of pads or synth arpeggios to build an atmosphere. If I've learned something from listening to Steve Roach, it's his completely opened sense of structure and form, so once a pad is launched, with or without rhythm, I start improvising to see if I can play something cool on it. After that, it's sometimes hard to tell if the recording is worth reworking or not, to improve the construction, the progression of the atmosphere inside a track and between various other tracks that may fit together to build a coherent set of tracks. This supposes that the concept of an album as a whole remains relevant... I'm not sure that the people who download my music listen to a whole album as a continuity, I'm often quite sure of the opposite :).

About the licence, the most important thing remains that the music must be good - if the licence is also fine, that's better, but the most important thing is the music.
As I produce my music alone, and as I don't really belive that a label could improve its diffusion by selling CDs or mp3s, I think that giving up my freedom to distribute my work freely would just tremendously reduce the numbers of listeners, of people who can encounter this music, download it and maybe like it. The CC licence is fine because it keeps anyone from selling my work without my approval.
But maybe will I change my mind one of these days :).

Nature.
I remember having a walk through a bright snowy landscape, thinking of many technical things about writing music, tweaking synths, guitar sounds and so on. And suddenly I just realised that the music was here, in the interaction of the landscape, nature, and myself. I had to dig inside of me, in the quiet of winter, to find the music that maybe was already there, instead of wondering how the features of this version of this piece of software would help improve the bass or the pads on a particular track. This is very important to me, but also very easy to forget.
Of course I listen to lots of music, and more and more ambient music. The two greatest influences in making "Life - Unfolding" were Rudy Adrian's "Healing Lake" and most of all the records of Thom Brennan, "Signals in Moolight" especially.

Another album :).
It's on its way, and it will surely look like the last one, with more guitar, and surely more rhythms.

Thanks to Yves aka Jazz Computer.org for allowing us that interview.