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MODULISME (translates MODULARISM) is a media documenting left-field Modular Synthesis.
A platform that aims to support original composing, for analog modular systems but not only… Providing ressources/interviews, weekly radio programs aired via 18 antennas, and above all label-like streaming music for you to listen to… Indeed we are offering original music and developing a platform that will document the genre and draw attention upon the composers who make it strong. We are championing the use of analog instruments, the use of electricity to sustain a sound produced with a musical intent, BUT what matters is the composition itself, the research/creation process, its interpretation/result and not the tools to achieve what composers may have in mind. https://modular-station.com/modulisme/ |
The importance of movement, the musical gesture
I am interested in the marriage of acoustics and electronics! Relying mainly on electricity via Modular Synthesis, I don't want to have a synthetic sound or for the machine to be used to reproduce other instruments. I don't use a keyboard which is an invitation to conventional scale playing... I like to build my instrument in different forms, simply by rearranging each of its modules. That "electronic lutherie" allows me to change the instrument, to surprise myself and to adapt to different projects/ideas/wants.
When one listens to a classical piece written for piano and guitar, for example, the tradition, the musical system used, makes this association of instruments (which are nevertheless opposed in their timbres, their modes of playing, their tessituras) seem obvious, almost natural. Whereas the listener may sometimes be disconcerted that a "noble" instrument, developed over several centuries, should join the synthesiser, a "young instrument", when played in an iconoclastic way. It is commonly accepted that learning an instrument is based on repetition and working out the technical difficulties. This produces magnificent instrumentalists, accomplished musicians who are given little opportunity to develop musical invention. The strength of the synthesiser or any new, prepared/modified instrument is precisely that it is not totally considered as an instrument for which one has to follow a playing technique, a method; the synthesiser obliges one to learn indissolubly linked to invention. Each technical problem is overcome by thought, by patching, and not by a reflex acquired to reproduce what is read in a score. Rather than writing an abstract score, I like to sculpt sound in a concrete way. I seek to establish morphologies, sound forms, which are almost all derived from the shifting, constantly changing sound across the pitch scale. There are few notes, strictly speaking, but rather a search for variation in pitch paths, a rhythmic fluidity. We are in the pure, raw state of movement, the synthesizer allows for new sound figures, a whole new reflection of musical language.
I attach a lot of importance to gesture in my compositional process, sculpting sounds, textures, developing stories while composing instantly, like a craftsman "with his hands in the sonic mud". HANDS ON ! I wish to manipulate the electric current, the sensation of putting my fingers in the circuits, to touch this fluidity lost since the musicians make sound design with a D.A.W. and do not play in a visceral way.
