What have the last few years taught me about creating music? More specifically, about my own creativity?

• That changing your style periodically, even (and especially) radically, allows you to renew your inspiration. Ditto for "changing your project name". In the absolute, even, you should only make debut albums, changing genre each time.

• That my best albums, or at least the ones I prefer, are the ones that weren't premeditated, that sort of built themselves up over time and by chance. That I must try to compose, to work "blind", without premeditating the final result, without thinking about the reactions and the discourse that will surround the album before I've written the first note; because that creates more anguish than pleasure, and produces more mediocre albums.

• That I can be wrong for a long time about the nature of my own music and of a particular musical project: for example, until recently I believed that Maelifell had a precise musical identity and that, as I didn't wish to delve into it, its discography was therefore closed; I had to go back over it in detail to realize that in reality we had NEVER released two stylistically identical releases, and that Maelifell therefore had no identity apart from being Xavier's and my band. And so we were free. That it could go on.

• That "musical genres" and "scenes" are prisons. Belonging to them is castration. The bands I love are the ones that created their own genre (and were then imitated by thousands of others, but that's another question). And all the more so insofar as Xavier and I unwittingly "invented" dungeon synth before discovering that it already existed, and we also "invented" industrial music before hearing about Throbbing Gristle. In all humility, we are inventors, not followers.

• That I can find meaning, a complete exegesis, in albums (like "Im Kreis der Birken") whose content is half improvisation, half scraping from the bottom of a drawer. Moral: I don't NEED to start with a concept or ideas, even if they're in bulk; the music alone is enough, it takes care of itself, and I'll find all the meaning I need in it, after the fact.

• That my feeble abilities AND aesthetic choices will probably forever deprive me of any success or even respect; that it's likely that the vast majority of people who come across my pieces must laugh or scorn. And that I must not only accept this, but find some pleasure in it.

• That creating involves an element of magic, in the strongest sense of the word, and that you have to expect inexplicable phenomena such as synchronicities: for example, Florence gave me the book "En Patagonie" by Bruce Chatwin when I was working on the album of the same name, which she didn't know. Similarly, since 2017, Xavier has unwittingly bought back the same Yamaha 4-track that I was using at the time, and I "coincidentally" came across the Grundig tape recorder that I had as a child and on which I made my very first recordings.

• That to be my first fan, my first critic, my own biographer, and to write about my music as a major cultural topic, was entirely legitimate and beneficial. Humility brings no pleasure and no added value when it comes to art.

• That blatant lies, hoaxes and pure fiction were just as legitimate and fun. Life is insufficient, but the imaginary not only provides consolation, but also expands life in return, creating new situations in real life. Imagination seeds real life.

• Insofar as I spent almost 10 years without making music (between my break-up with Florence and my reunion with Xavier), only to return to it by pure chance, it's impossible to know when one's "career" will end, nor, when it does, whether it's definitive or not. In other words, you have no control over whether or not you pursue an artistic activity. It's imposed on you; and it can disappear even if you don't want it to.

I've downloaded a bunch of VSTs in the last few days, with a touch of early 2000s nostalgia, because of their sometimes grotesquely "science-fiction" interface, which already evokes I don't know what as-yet unseen retrofuturism, and because I spent a few years working exclusively with them (alongside my composing for Maelifell or FDS, which were entirely PC-free).

There's a certain purity in composing only with a PC, a sequencer, VSTs and possibly a master keyboard. I've always hated the tangle of cables, the thousand problems with connections, compatibility, MIDI settings, latency, etc.... From this point of view, working in the studio at Xavier's or my place can sometimes seem like torture.

VSTs have their own flaws and limitations, of course - they're cold and often sound far too similar, and after going through X dozen of them you're so saturated with identical and discouraging sounds that you'd almost consider, with relief, stopping all musical activity. But I still think I've found a few that I missed, in terms of "types of sound", moods... In particular, some excellent 90's ambient pads and half-tribal, half-metallic FM percussion.

The idea behind all this is to compose with sounds I rarely use (or have never used before) to renew myself musically and give birth to compositions I don't know yet, and don't want to know in advance, what they'll sound like, what "style" they'll be assimilated to, if indeed there is such a thing as assimilating to a style or scene. I'm looking for the sensation of moving forward totally blind, into the unknown, without any determinism, without any preconceived ideas, without any goal.

For a number of years now, I've noticed that my best albums, or at least the ones I prefer, are the ones that weren't premeditated, that sort of built themselves, as time went by and as samples or VSTs were discovered by chance; I'm deeply convinced that each synth, each bank of samples or presets, "contains" in germ its own musical genre and the tracks that correspond to it. All you have to do is change them from time to time and let yourself be carried along; the music creates itself. And it's good not to control everything, to be able to be surprised and changed by what you yourself have created or helped to create, like a simple channel for transmitting a message from God, or from your own unconscious, or from nowhere.

The first songs for Maelifell – or, more precisely, for what was to become Maelifell – were written and recorded around 1994-1995, when we were 14-15 years old.

Xavier and I were still in middle school, listening to heavy metal, cold wave and Dead Can Dance, which we thought was unique in its genre (and indeed, it's not entirely untrue). I knew about black metal, but had never listened to it.

At the same time, I was also recording alone, for a band I called Hesperides Garden, which had a maximum of... two members. Two guitarists, no bass, no drums, no keyboard; it was still far from my dream. But sometimes I rented keyboards from the local music store and recorded songs on my own. Some were released under the name Hesperides Garden, others ended up on the first Maelifell demo.

What I'm trying to say through these anecdotes is that even if Maelifell (I have no intention of denying this or rewriting history) was carried along, encouraged, uninhibited by our discovery of black metal and bands like Mortiis, fundamentally, we already existed before we knew them, we had our own aesthetic, our own themes, and our background comes as much from post-punk and its mutations as from the mutations of metal (the "dungeon synth").

Maelifell intersected with the history of dungeon synth (just as it later intersected with the neoclassical/darkwave milieu), but neither belongs to it nor was it determined by it.