A few days ago, I thought about the physical wear and tear and the even crueler fate that books sometimes suffer – such a text whose author has been lost, such another of which only snippets remain... and the rare books, the disappeared, mythical books, of which we sometimes only know a vague summary, thanks to other authors, themselves buried under the sands of time.
The books quoted, plagiarized, interpolated in other works. Literary sampling.
All this will be just as true, in the future, for music. Sample banks, film extracts, nameless mp3s, albums of which only badly encoded rips will remain, old digital cassettes with unidentified content, demos half-readable due to wear and tear of the tape or digital support, works of which only a few promotional extracts will have survived, musical plundering, unacknowledged plagiarism, shoddy remixes, disappeared groups of which only the name will remain in anthologies and in the memory of specialists who will themselves disappear.
Thinking that maybe, in a hundred and fifty years, only one minute of my music will remain, badly encoded and unidentified, on a corner of some medium, I tell myself that it will have been worth it.
When I do some research on Google or on peer-to-peer, I notice that my music already exists mostly in the form of incomplete or false fragments, sometimes badly encoded, badly catalogued. That's exactly what it should be.
To give up completeness. Exhaustiveness. To mourn what will remain of me after my death.
To mourn also, already, any completeness in my future works.
To accept the idea of producing nothing more than more or less advanced drafts. Snippets of melodies, preparatory samples that will never be used for anything, drawings pencilled on a corner of a sheet of paper, lists of names and dates as an autobiography. Incomplete scripts, incipits that go nowhere, bits of dialogue without context.
I also only have access to fragments of my own memory. I never remember everything at once. I never know exactly who I am and what my life has been like, or where it is going.
And I only give others access to fragments of this life that is and has been mine. Stingy, tiny, unspeakable fragments, which do not allow anyone to say that they know me.
Radio. France Culture, etc. Mixtapes. Music, broadcasts, readings of literary works whose titles and authors I don't know, interviews with people I don't know who they are.
It must be a technique to exploit as a creator. To leave the need of recognition, to create anonymous works, voluntarily fragmentary, incomplete, badly labelled, etc... several alternative versions by work, to create oneself the doubt, the ambiguity.
