Ombilicum

This is probably the first volume of a series of works on the idea of filiation, a questioning on where we get what we are from and what trace we leave in others without knowing it, everyone growing up fed by unknown textures that are mostly invisible though they do build up personality.
When I was a kid, there was an old upright piano standing in the living room of my parents’ house in the countryside near Lyon (south east of France), with loads of my mother’s bibelots throning on its cap, which would make it nearly impossible - even outrageous - to open when time had come to tune it. I would sit there for hours, playing it with my right hand while blasting heavenly pads chords on my casio synth with the left one. It was mostly improvisation and repetition. I used to record these on a tape recorder then I would listen to it thinking “waow, those five seconds there are just beautiful”. The tracks were most of the time about twenty minutes long! Since then, when working for other musicians or artists as a producer, I’ve always tried to stick to those five seconds miracle, thinking that if you had these in a track, the track was ok. Or you would have to look for them.
You see, I’ve been more on the rock side of the road from college on, head banging over a strat or strumming wildly to the chorus of an irish song in a pub somewhere. Only a year ago, to me, the guy with the computer was the guy in the studio, talking plugs and effects, gate, threshold, cardioid, insert or vst, words i would just nod to, as long as it sounded ok to my ears. I’ve always been writing folk songs when time allows, cool melodic s low acoustic guitar stuff. As I had eleven new songs, I thought I might as well record them though I had no budget for this project and could not afford to have it recorded and mixed in a studio. So i bought myself a D.a.w. ?? Digital Audio Workstation. Which i’m married to now. From january to may 2010, i got to know her, learnt to speak her language, basic everyday words first. I spent hours on the net, watching video tutorials, reading hundreds of threads, clicking madly through sites links to the big new VST plug of the century. I realized quickly that software was quite expensive too. Hopefully on the world wide web, you can get a professional advice on how to use a compressor for free. You can actually get the compressor itself for free too (see freeware list below), and sounds, and effects, loops, even Daws. You can find people on the net too, real stunningly brilliant people. This is the place where i would like to thank those who build up virtual machines that way, with genius, talent and freedom of thought. You get to learn to click on the “donate” button. Today, i’m painting moments of sound with their amazing tools.


I spent spring and summer mostly on the machine, choosing sonorities, conditioning them to alteration so they would speak that language i was looking for. I realized that all this sound manipulation had a friendly taste to me. It was not easy, but it was curiously familiar. As if i had done this in some other life, or was it childhood showing up? By the end of august, i had composed nearly sixty pieces of instrumental music, mostly orchestral stuff, + a dozen of new age / ambient / chill-out (call it what you like) tracks that friends found so relaxing and soothing that they said they wanted that, home. So it’s in your hands now, or on your hard drive, OMBILICUM, which I hope will give you some time of rest or just nice background music while talking with friends over a 2004 French Bordeaux bottle. There’s no particular extremely philosophical hard-boiled concept behind all this. The thing is just an attempt at marrying sounds from different sources that will bring something back to memory. I think that when a music is relaxing, it means that it is actually doing something to the mind, by re-assembling pieces of reassuring memories that eventually make you think there might me some order in this chaos.