objet – polaroids volume 1

Making of

Polaroids

Everything is improvisation. You can freeze an improvisation and listen to it again. Like a snapshot. A Polaroid. This album is a collection of Polaroids. Each image has been fixed to the support with an electric guitar, an amp, a microphone and a few effects pedals. And a looper used for repeating and testing time and sometimes as a wide-angle lens to blur the sonic background. Nothing was written in advance, but the late hour meant that some pieces came out pre-arranged. No post-production either (apart from a few left-right collages of two tracks). You can hear the wind, cows in the distance and the click of pedal switches.

Relaxation

If there was a goal, it was not to make a collection of sound Polaroids but rather an introspection of my guitar playing, putting aside what feeds and and disturbs it: technology, stylistic presuppositions and the studio. No quest for sonic perfection, no given direction, no temporal or spatial constraints. Instead, the search for a music that relaxes, leaves thinking aside and engages mind and body in a trance where the instrument asks the fingers to move without the head conscious intervention. But sometimes naturalness returns in the form a jazz standard, an old math-rock obsession or an unfinished progression progression that wants to stay that way. I welcome them as part of the process.

Publication

I feel like the editor of a film of which I am also the director. I assemble the different sequences to make sense of them as a whole. Each vignette tells its own story (my story?) and introduces the next one in a continuity that is neither chronological nor sonic, but rather sensitive. Giving meaning through the senses.