I'm listening to an ambient track by ILDJARN that sounds like it's coming out of the same synth as B12 – and so I think of B12.

Axiom: the choice of a synthesizer rather than another is more than a choice of material, it is even more than the choice of a style of music. It is also the choice of the whole era in which it was produced and of all that was done with this material, and that its sounds will evoke by association of ideas.

I'm listening to "The Summerlands" and I remember the powerful sound of the music as it came out of my synthesizer speakers.

The shaky version, afflicted with the hiss and muffled frequencies typical of a cassette recording, sounds pitiful in comparison.

But in the end, it's good that it is. This fragile, diminished sound is the image of my memories of that already distant time. It is the sound image of the time that has passed, that veils and degrades everything, and that separates me from the living source.

The bunker blues comes from nostalgia, from the feeling of loss and dispossession of an original innocence, of a healthy primitivity, of an Eden from which we have been driven.

"Sapiens"

"Robinson's Requiem"

Tribe. Primitiveness.

The bunker is like a cave. Place of life of the first men, but also tomb. Other types: a teenager's room. A womb.

The cave and the bunker represent verticality, interiority, darkness. The steppe represents horizontality, exteriority, light.

"Moya": American Indians and A-bomb.

The bad primitiveness of the modern man.

To leave the bunker, to find an empty steppe. The hostility of the world.

But also the possibility to build something (again?)

Earth beaten by the winds (of History, of the Spirit, etc)

"Les Passagers du Vent"

Bunkers of Hoste and Meuse.

Driving on the deserted roads of Meuse, going from village to village with Laurence, going along endless fields and orchards, I had hallucinations where WAV files visualized on Audacity, kilometers of magnetic tape, trees were mixed, and as in a trip under LSD I imagine, a mysterious equivalence operated between all these things, for example I assimilated the hiss of the tapes to sound space, and the trees to events which take place in space, in this case, sounds, which occur with hiss as a background.

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The sound waves, in a software like Audacity or Wavelab, sometimes look like forests of fir trees in the distance.

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The hiss that precedes the music when you start a tape is the sound that indicates that you are entering another world, where something is going to happen; in this case, incidentally, music.

This hiss is the sound image of the immense expanse of another space-time, whose image is engraved on the tape.

The electronic hiss is the audio equivalent of the space in which things are arranged and arrive. Not a parasite. Not the sound of emptiness, of absence. But a framework, a background, present, perceptible, as one can perceive the grain of the canvas, under the paint.

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The basis of my music is the hiss. The clattering and the noises produced by the release or the stop of a cassette. The hum of a floppy disk drive. And the old sounds of a PCM keyboard or an ancient Soundblaster. It's the fetishism of old, outdated, forgotten machines that had their limits but now seem so much more carnal than VST synths, etc.

There is no theoretical discourse to develop on this subject. It's only a personal preference, linked to my age, to the technologies I grew up with. One misses the DX7 as one missed the accordion of the musette dances of his youth.

It is about technological poetry; no matter what the theme of the artist, or the exact style of music he plays. The poetry comes from the machine itself, not from the artist's intention.