240116_on_air

I've recorded a lot. No less than 30 albums in a 30-year career. I've played too little. Of course, there have been the bands with small successes, the memorable opening acts, the insignificant venues transformed into auditory paradises in the interludes of an evening, the derisory pay slips. The life of a little artist eternally in the making, unable to let go of his moorings in the ocean of music because he's so busy exploring all kinds of paths in all directions (love, travel, children, writing, cinema). I'm one of those people whose passions explode in all directions. An attitude not much appreciated by my contemporaries, who are obsessed with success, domination and excessive specialization, and for whom not doing something "thoroughly" is tantamount to wasting their time. Yet music has always been the common thread that binds everything together and gives coherence to research on all fronts. And recording, sometimes obsessively, is a method of fixing time and preventing it from eating away at everything too quickly. But a testimony, however accurate and honest, is never worth the experience.

Let's take the example of this one-year trip to the South American continent. Everything has been said, written and filmed about this corner of the world since man first spoke, wrote and filmed. We could spend a lifetime poring over these archives. Nothing can replace the biting cold of an evening bivouac on the altiplano, the taste of burnt corn or the vertigo felt on these roads suspended in the void. It's the same with music. Recording, mixing, producing, distributing, collecting, listening to again and again over the years are all guarantees of an activity that will never produce the pleasure and realism of an activity practised for its own sake.

Is it the effect of age, of weariness, of this world heading for disaster (in the sense of losing the star that illuminates it), I can't easily identify the causes that now lead me to play (great verb) music for myself and those with ears passing nearby. But if time now passes between two deliveries of "works compiled according to an agreed format", we must resolve to consider it as excellent news in the digital noise that surrounds us. So I'm going to do a lot of playing and too little recording in 2024.