The new album by Parisian composer, computer scientist and theoretician, and software developer Matthias Puech, A Geography Of Absence, is a journey through a visceral, melancholic and sometimes abrasive imagined terrain of synthesized sound. He combines noise, field recordings and compositions built with synthesizer modules that he designs and develops, working with the American company 4ms.

He spoke with The Wire’s Deputy Editor Emily Bick.

Emily Bick: How did you come up with the concept for A Geography Of Absence? Listening to it, it seems like you have a cycle going where a lot of the track titles have to do with transformation and a process of growth. It proceeds through tracks like “Tunnel Vision” and “Chrysalis”, and then you end it with this idea of "Homeostasis", and I just wanted to know what the thinking was behind writing the tracks and putting it together.

Matthias Puech: For my first album, Alpestres, I had a pretty clear idea of where I wanted to go, and it sounded a little bit like a concept album. Kind of pre-thought, a thought was already there at the beginning of the composition. For this one, it was not a thought, I would say, it was more a state of state of mind. The genesis is actually pretty sad. It's the result of a tragic event in my life. I didn't point this out in the [press release], because I want the listeners to make their own idea. But since you you're asking, I lost some dear people and I also got through a very hard waiting process during the last few years, and it was my way of coping with it.

You have that feeling of a passing through a sort of a journey there.

I don't know if it's exactly what you're asking. But on Alpestres, and some works I did before this record, I had wanted things to sound very melodic, or very appealing to children. I wanted a music that was accessible to people who wouldn't have a music background, music theory. But this record, after all these works, I needed things to sound very loud and very distorted and I wanted something that would hurt a little bit.

These things are both very physical feelings. If you're writing for children, you want them to connect with the music on a kind of naïve response level where they just react to it. And they feel a certain way. And if you're working with really harsh noise, that evokes a kind of melancholy or just a painful kind of feeling, it's not something that you think about either, it's not something that you analyse. It's so interesting to hear you say this, when so much of your composition is based on very complicated processes, and all of the tools that you've developed are so complex, in all of the patches that you make, and all of the software that you design. Do you see any contradiction there?

Ah...(laughs)...that's the paradox of my whole life. You know? So I'm a scientist, I studied computer science and physics, and for literary people, or for artistic people, I was always referred to “He's a scientist, but..." And on the other side, yes, I was a scientist, but I was a bit of a weirdo too. I don't know how to resolve this. I mean, I use my tools, the tools I design, very heavily in my music, but I don't design them at all to be analytic, or to fill a certain technical purpose. From the start, I designed them out of frustration that these tools don't exist for my own music.

I was reading an interview where you were discussing your modular synth tool, Tapographic Delay, [a complex multi-tap delay in the Eurorack format that can be played in real time]. You were saying something about how you're frustrated with delay pedals, and how people would just loop and loop and loop, and it would get really boring. And it seems like a lot of the things that you make add lots of complexity and things that are not obvious loops and obvious patterns. Your tools set up multiple patterns to compete and work with each other, against each other. Is that something that you try to do?

MP: Yes. I'm obsessed with the idea of bringing something to life. Making life emerge from an inert thing, it's the goal of complexity, complex systems. It's a branch of computer science and mathematics that's interested in this. From very simple systems that you could totally understand on their own, if you place many of them side by side, and they interact with each other in a very simple way, something else emerges. And I'm obsessed with the idea that the modular synth is basically this: modules are very simple entities. They have a manual that explains from A to Z what they perform. So – on their own, they don't produce anything interesting. They don't make any sound, but if you if you make them interact with each other, if you patch them together, at some point, sometimes very, very rarely, something happens. And that something to me is what I'm looking for. It's life. Life in the inert.

Scientifically I'm very interested in this idea, and I think it brings something musical or artistically interesting. What I don't want to hear about is artificial intelligence. To me, that's not intelligence. We call it intelligence because it's something we don't understand well, so it looks to us like intelligence. What's interesting to me is that surely the machine is not intelligent at all. It's not even interesting at all. Where the music emerges is not from the machines, but from the listeners' ears.

You were talking in an earlier interview about a kind of idea of animism and how you relate to the environment around you, whether that's in the recording studio or whether that's in the natural environment where you make field recordings, and how the two are sort of part of the same thing. But you have a sense of animism. Is that a kind of a similar feeling? Or how would you connect that to the idea of music emerging in the listener?

Yeah, well to me the same. In music, in art in general, in life, I think – we look for traces of patterns of dialogue everywhere. And especially when interacting with machines. With the outside world, we constantly look for patterns, and for causes, and for signs of or our own intelligence in our environment.

I don't know if I can call it that, but my kind of animism is this: I bought a Roomba. You know, the vacuum cleaner that cleans automatically. And sometimes it gets stuck on the rug. The battery discharges completely and it dies, blocked on the rug. But before that, it sends me a SMS that says, “I will have to turn off now.” And every time I receive this SMS it's such a sad thing. I interpret this, very simple fact of a machine that's out of juice in such a living, such an animal way. I think it's very touching.

When you are working with the compositional tools you have designed, how do you monitor the complexity of what sounds they produce? I'm thinking especially of Ensemble Oscillator, when you have 16 oscillators that are controlling lots of inputs and outputs and they're all ricocheting off each other. So if you're working with a system like this, do you lose control of which effects are delivering which outputs? In a system like this, is losing control part of the appeal?

Definitely, it's not part of the appeal, it is the appeal. A lot of synth creators try, I think too much: to restrain the machine from losing this control that you talked about. My goal, when I design a machine, is to start from a very simple idea. I mean, it's just 16 oscillators put side by side and each of them is pretty simple and they interact with frequency modulation. This is very common since the 70s, but I make a point in not restraining the controls. When you design a machine, you have to choose the range of the knob: what are the extreme values of each knob, and how they will respond to the touch of the user? And one way to design a tool like this is to restrict the potentiometer, the knob, to the positions that I like that are acceptable to my ears or to my understanding of what this thing does. I make a point in not following this principle and extending the range of the functions in general, so that I'm surprised by it when I use it. And it's a great, great joy when I see other people using it, then recording music. Or, you know, YouTube videos that are half music, half experimentation, where I don't understand what's going on. I love this.

Now you're making tools in your role at GRM. Could tell me a little bit about what you're doing there, because that's such a huge deal.

Yeah, for me it is, actually! So GRM has many different missions. One is to organise concerts and festivals. Présences électronique, Acousma, and several others. And they do residencies. We have three studios where we welcome composers. Actually, I was a composer invited at GRM before getting this job. They invited me to compose a piece for Festival Présences two years ago, and we met there and they realized I was a computer scientist. They have also had this activity since the 90s, of developing computer tools for the composers. They're called GRM Tools and it's a suite of plugins that existed, even before the PC. It existed on the proper hardware in the 70s and it continued on to up until today, and I'm taking over-- the main developer retired. So I'll be developing software and probably a little bit more too for GRM.

That’s great. You have a full history with IRCAM too. I read that you started going on training sessions to use some software when you were like, maybe like 12 or 13. You were very young!

So actually, I wanted to be a sound engineer when I was 12 or something, and my dad told me, oh my God, my son wants to be a sound engineer, that's not noble enough! (laughs) My parents were intellectual. So he found IRCAM as a meeting point, you know, between the rock and roll sound engineer that I wanted to be, and the academic and more institutional side of things. So my dad subscribed me to these, weekends of trainings for the tools that IRCAM was building at the time. It was the time when IRCAM was still in charge of Max/MSP, and they were teaching Max/MSP and AudioSculpt and all the software suites that that they had there. And I was 12 and I didn't understand a word! But it was very important for me, it was very formative for me.

A lot of people at that age would probably have freaked out and just stopped, and not gone back.

You know, I entered the anechoic chamber: they had a tour at IRCAM, and they brought us in the anechoic chamber and that changed my life.

What was your reaction?

It’s a realisation of how much space, the surroundings, the walls play a central role in your perception in general. So you feel like you're in the desert, your ears tells your brain that you're in the desert, that there is no reflection at all, but there is no wind, no background noise. You can hear your own bodily, fluids inside of you and you lose control. And you’re walking on thin wire mesh that’s in the middle of the room. And you're losing balance because so much of your sense of your environment is based on the reflection of the sound around you. It’s quite amazing. I recommend it.

A Geography Of Absence is released by Nahal Recordings