In the late 1970s I started to write and produce music involving hundreds of parts or tracks. In the early days the analogue recording medium was very noisy when bouncing (or premixing) tracks together. Things improved throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but a large multitrack digital tape recorder was still out of my financial reach. By the late 1990s the new computer and hard drive speeds finally provided me with an affordable multitrack solution. For the first time in my life I was able to achieve the balance between individual voices that I had so carefully notated in the original scores. I achieved further musical clarity and a new depth of sound by using quality compression, equalization and reverb. To remaster, I went back to the individual tracks. This was a huge undertaking. For example, a piece like Dancing on the Walls of Jericho may be only 16 minutes and 15 seconds long, but it is a large tape work comprising eighty hours of original recorded materials. Recordings always freeze or crystallize musical and spectral meaning for the listener. An odd sound combination that you have grown fond of in the old master may not appear in the same way in the new one. However, I think you will agree that I have stayed true to the original compositions. I changed some musical moments and transitions in Dancing on the Walls of Jericho, and the tape components for Physics of Seduction, Invocations #2 and #3, all originally released on the L’ivresse de la vitesse CD in 1994. These changes were motivated by compositional concerns and were created using the musical materials from the Walls Cycle. The only new recordings made for the remastering process were the drum parts (performed by Philippe Keyser) in Physics of Seduction, Invocations #2 and #3. I invite you to discover my new levels of meaning and clarity in the new masters, which are much closer to my original artistic intention.

The acceleration of our culture in terms of images and ideas creates a point at which everything seems to be happening at once and the maintenance of a linear historical perspective, with its revolutionary eruptions, is no longer meaningful. This simultaneity is musically alluded to several times in the composition by the use of several hundred solos occurring at once. Each solo has its own narrative and history but when all of them are combined together such narrative structures dissolve into one large sound field, often without clear beginning or ending. This breakdown of a linear time perspective and the resulting loss of our musical and social subjectivity create a feeling of absence and a perception of stasis. It is at that moment of æsthetic perception in which our day-to-day realities dissolve and there is a suspension of linear time that the possibility of new thought or feeling, revolutionary or otherwise, can begin.

Part of the Resonance Cycle plays with the notion of intimacy in music. In this case the soloist is often surrounded with his own sound, creating a dissolving of the singular with the “other”, which is in fact the performer reflected back in a narcissistic fashion. Beyond these elements, the Resonance Cycle also uses voice, which is perhaps the most intimate and seductive sound of all because it represents the body covered with appearances, illusions, traps, animal parodies and sacrificial simulations.

All great systems of production and interpretation, including musical discourses, increasingly appear as a large futile body. A universe that can no longer be interpreted in the terms of psychological relations, or in structures of oppositions, must be interpreted in the terms of play, challenges, duels, and the strategy of appearances – that is in terms of seduction. Moreover, seduction threatens all orthodoxies with their collapse as it is a black magic for the deviation of all truths.

Veils […] is a series of textures or walls of sound, which act as an invitation for the listener to explore an environment where new acoustic sensations and associations can be discovered. The texture, a sustained chord of usually 14 – 56 notes, is constantly transforming by changing the instrument type that is articulating the sound (i.e. from strings to voice to brass to piano to marimba to glass etc.) No electronic effects were used and only straight recordings and mixing of acoustic instruments were used. However, the sound source or instrument type at any moment is not usually obvious to the listener, hence the sound sources are veiled. This veiled sound is created by three main factors: the extensive multitracking (from 180 to 280 tracks of the same instrument are used at any moment), the tuning of the chords (microtonal intervals which do not occur in our normal 12-tone equally tempered tuning system), and the recording method of close miking in a dead acoustical space which brings out aspects of each instrument type that we normally do not hear.