Matthias Puech
Where are you now?
Spending most of my time in an underwater optical fiber, going back and forth at the speed of light in the Atlantic Ocean, like everyone else.
Where would you like to be?
With my sick mother.
What are you doing at the moment?
Seen from here, the lockdown appears like a sort of collective paradoxical sleep, a moment of apparent inactivity that serves an invisible purpose that is beyond us all, for the moment. The contrast between the slow and peaceful domestic life (your mileage may vary) and the turmoil of the outside world is striking; we are in the eye of a cyclone.
I dedicate a lot of time to seemingly mundane tasks, DIY, repair of electronic equipment, various experiments, which I feel help me to internalize the current personal and collective situation. An American study carried out a few years ago on veteran soldiers from Iraq explored gaming as a remedy to post-traumatic stress disorder: playing Tetris, a simplistic game, was found to be more effective than other games that were a priori more suggestive of happiness or peace. Growing germinated seeds, cultivating leaven, dissolving the shell of an egg in vinegar to see through it... I try in my own way to become aware of the time of life. I also installed a makeshift antenna on my balcony to capture and record electromagnetic waves with a small HAM radio receiver ("software-defined radio"). You can hear the sound of GSM transmitters, transmissions from stratospheric balloons measuring weather conditions, and all kinds of "parasitic" signals whose origin elude me; it is another world, omnipresent and imperceptible. I also plugged back a small microscope to observe life on a different scale: the mosses in the building courtyard, the soil of potted plants, the abundant life that develops in mattresses (yes!)...
What are you hearing right now?
Laurie Spiegel's hippie synthesizers, a replay of France Culture from the kitchen, the chirps of jays through the half-open window, and the intrigued responses of our parakeet. From time to time the distant sirens of an ambulance on the avenue that leads to the Bobigny hospital.
Do you use this confinement to make music?
Not much surprisingly, partly because I find it difficult in the ambient chaos to find the availability and openness necessary to creating, partly because I am preoccupied by other perspectives. I hope it will come back, but I am definitely not forcing anything.
What will the world be like next?
The predictions are not good and I am a natural pessimist, and yet I find it hard not to daydream, seeing for the first time in my life these empty streets, this blue sky, immaculate from any plane, the sweetness of the silence, the overall decrease in pollution... What if... nothing happened? What if, after months of shutdown, life continued to flourish at the same rate as during the crisis, without noise, without movement, without strictly unnecessary activity, but above all without the anxiety of the virus and its consequences? What if the expected economic crisis only happened to demonstrate its relative harmlessness in the face of the epidemic, illness, loss of a loved one? What if we realized that thanks to all these cables that link us now a large part of our work could be done remotely, that thanks to all these machines we invented, only a fraction of human activity was really necessary, and that we could finally... rest? What if all of humanity, not collectively but each in their own intimate will, suddenly realized the value and beauty of Life, that of Humans but also all that surrounds us, heck, that of the virus itself, in a sort of technological animism, and that leisure, pleasure, discovery and creation were what really mattered?
It is of course only a naive daydream that this catastrophic situation paradoxically lets me imagine, but surely like many other thoughts emerging from the crisis, I know that it will outlive it. The only certainty we can dare to posit is that nothing will be as before!
How can we support the music community?
I don't know, but I am counting on it to support the rest of the world once the health part of this crisis is behind us; it will need it.
Five music to recommend?
It might be time to break away from the unending cycle of new releases, and listen again to less recent records that have moved us. My selection of the moment:
- John Luther Adams, "In The White Silence"
- Maryanne Amacher, "Petra"
- Oren Ambarchi, "Quixotism"
- Institute of Landscape Architecture, "Melting Landscapes"
- Pancrace, "The Fluid Hammer"
A book?
"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. The most calming disaster scenario there is.
What will you do when you get out?
Probably about the same as now! The daily confinement, the social obligations reduced to benevolence towards loved ones and neighbors, the sedentary life and the natural refocusing suit me quite well actually :-)
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