The Inclusion Principle

The session for this CD was the first hour of our first meeting in the studio, and the music is a real time improvisation with minimal subsequent sound editing.

Hervé's material is layered and manipulated from natural sounds - wood, fire, metal, water, rock, wind - and their instrumental equivalents (wooden percussions, meditation bowls, strings, wind instruments, etc.) Recorded sounds are sculpted into rhythmic, harmonic or textural material intrinsic to the source. These sound sources mirror Hervé's work in the visual arts which is also principally concerned with these phenomena.

Martin's material is mainly real time played violin transformed by live software processing. Use of pre-existing sound files was kept to a minimum, with looped material being created in the course of the improvisation.

Playing a violin and using a mouse at the same time is an interesting physical process. Playing the environment has always been man's fascination. It becomes interesting and efficient when no physical trace is left but its music.

On Martin's suggestion to base the title of the album on a phrase of the research physicist Wolfgang Pauli, we found a correlation in that we both worked with a digital scalpel on fields of microsounds; a science which took both our instruments and processed field recordings a little closer to the chemistry of natural sounds, complete with harmonic DNA sequences and rhythmical fragments quantum-jumping from cell to cell. I was intrigued by the idea of the 'exclusion principle' and decided that Pauli was 'not even wrong' in his theory since Martin and Hervé successfully managed to sit together in the same room. And indeed, both improvisers and techno-freaks clashed and thrashed their laptops to come up with the present album… if there were two identical particles in the same field, they stringed a crop of pure love and tenderness, just for your ears.

For both of us, the use of geek technology is a practical decision but we remain instrumentalists before all. Our music feeds from our practice of improvisation and other contemporary approaches to musical creation and research but in the end, our main source of inspiration will always be deep listening and a fascination for the science of the natural world. Sometimes, sitting in silence for hours in the crest of birdsongs or in wafts of windy harmony is more profitable than practicing scales. And to a certain extent, our recording session in the studio 'happened' as an unspoken intense inner excitement. And we left it to rest, a little calmer, as if something had happened in the space between thoughts.