"I wanted a name that would evoke my region and establish a certain atmosphere, without being particularly descriptive. I also wanted something with a Germanic sound to it. Othilia met those criteria: it is a Germanic given name, a variant of Odile, and a reference to Saint Odile, the patron saint of Alsace, after whom a mountain and a convent are also named – and I was living nearby at the time.
My influences for this project did not really come from the post-industrial scene. The one influence I am clearly conscious of in relation to Othilia is Gas, Wolfgang Voigt’s side project. I knew I would never be able to reproduce his sound, nor was that my intention. But he showed me what could be done with a technoid foundation when the sound was processed into ambient music. I know it is a cliché to put it this way, but when you listen to his music, it feels as though you are hearing a rave party from a considerable distance, in the middle of nowhere, deep in a forest – a ghost rave, heard through the thickness of space and time. Fragments of music and rhythm, muffled and indistinct. What interests me here is less the musical genre itself than the way the sound is treated. It is a pure exercise in production before it is an exercise in composition.
It was in the same spirit that I used a passage from Ulver’s first album, Bergtatt, between the two tracks on Sonnenzeit. The music is already sublime, but better still, the sound is completely muffled and distant – again, you have the impression of hearing something barely filtering through the years and through memory. It is a matter of personal sensitivity: just as I physically cannot stand modern productions with their massive bass and skull-splitting volume, I am very easily moved by distant, feeble, slightly dirty sounds that evoke the past and memories for me. To me, they are the equivalent of a yellowed photograph.
My equipment for Sonnenzeit was limited to a PC and a few samples. I did everything at my then-girlfriend’s place, on a salvaged computer that could barely connect to the Internet and run a few old, undemanding music programs. I do not have any particular compositional process. The basis of the two tracks is a collection of house music-type samples, used in a program that generates loops according to algorithms. This means that I generated hours and hours of music, all of which then had to be listened to again, selected and discarded. My fundamental work on this record consisted of choosing the initial sounds and then acting as a curator. Chance lies at the heart of the process, and this element of chance – and therefore of non-responsibility for the music being produced – is extremely important to me, fundamental even. I need to be surprised by the sounds I produce. I do not want music of which I am the author from A to Z, controlling and mastering everything. There has to be a kind of magic at work, whether it comes from other musical partners – I had none on this record – or from wrong notes, accidents, or this kind of software.
Once I had the music, I added samples: the little children heard at the very beginning of the album – my sister and me as babies, in this case – or the short Ulver excerpt placed between the two tracks. And there are others that blend almost imperceptibly into the music, whose origins I have, in fact, forgotten, which is perfect. My choice of samples follows a dual logic. There may be a particular, sentimental meaning connected to my own past – which is often the case, because my relationship with music is primarily sentimental. But I can also choose samples entirely at random from my collection and decide to include them for no other reason than the surrealist charm they lend to the music. Again, as with random generation, it is a way of provoking accidents, of being slightly less of an absolute author and simply becoming a kind of channel through which something impersonal can pass. On this album, both motives are at work simultaneously.
I took the cover photograph myself, in a forest in Alsace, more precisely at the Champ du Feu, a place that means an enormous amount to me. I have always loved the majesty of those forests, the silence that reigns there, the almost imperceptible remnants of the past – castle ruins, half-submerged stone walls. Even during periods when I was far away from it, this landscape remained my mental landscape. I remember being very young, perhaps around twelve, and thinking that if, after death, we came back to haunt the places of our lives, this was where I would want to return.
Othilia is not ‘about’ anything. I have no cause to defend through music. It is purely a sound project – exquisite corpses designed to induce reverie, because a work of art is neither a political tract nor the soundtrack to one. Its poetic function comes first, if it is not in fact its sole function. On the other hand, the sounds I choose and the atmospheres I try to create are connected to the past, to my past, to my most intimate references. The music I create aims to bring all of that back to life, again and again. I want to revive something. A sound, a feeling. Without discourse, without a story. Something ineffable.
I composed these tracks years before choosing the cover photograph, and the photograph itself had been taken more than twenty years earlier. The encounter between the music and the cover is itself an exquisite corpse. I could have made a different choice, and that would have shaped the listening experience differently. But at some point, you have to decide.
As for the radio static layered over the music at certain moments, it is simply a sound I like. I find it as soothing as rain against a window. I listened to the radio a great deal as a teenager and made some absolutely decisive discoveries through it – Muslimgauze or The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud, used as background music on France Culture; Gavin Bryars on German radio; and other things that had an enormous influence on me and whose names I still do not know twenty-five years later. Radio static was part of that soundscape, and I love it in the same way one might love the crackle of vinyl or the hiss of a cassette tape. I wanted to recapture that atmosphere on my own record. To use a thoroughly worn-out cliché, it is my Proustian madeleine. And I am pursuing exactly the same goal: to destroy time."