Extract from an interview with Patrick Clette, 12 April 1999

The meaning of the word "Korwar" and the principle of the piece suggest the idea of construction from raw elements. Do you think we find a similar phenomenon in the plastic arts?

Certainly, in fact, a Korwar is a work of visual art, since it's a skull transformed into a sculpture. It's a reliquary that includes a skull, which is itself clearly recognisable, to which additions are made that make it a sculpture: colours, coloured pastes, shells in the eye sockets, etc. are added. So, of course, it exists, and it even existed in the visual arts before it existed in music, since we had to wait for sound recording. I think I was the first to do this, starting with Rituel d'oubli , when I included raw sounds and no longer synthetic sounds or anything else. I was the first to do this when I mixed raw sounds with instrumental sounds; I was also the first to use whale sounds, and then the whales became the stars of the record, so much the better, it means that others realised that there was an interesting world out there. 

And are there any similarities in the European visual arts? 

Yes, there's the great surrealist ancestor, because driftwood was seen as a potential sculpture even before the 14-18 war. It was the generation of Max Ernst and Picasso that included butterflies in their cubist paintings. Of course, there were predecessors like Victor Hugo, who used bits of lace in some of his drawings. But in music, this remained the programme of the Italian Futurists, only they didn't have the means, they couldn't do otherwise than build instruments that would produce the sounds of the real world and these instruments, as far as we can tell, weren't really convincing, only they didn't have a tape recorder. It was Ruttmann who first did this with the tape for the film Weekend, in the thirties. As soon as there was a sound track that could be used in film, we had a form of tape recorder, so to speak, that allowed recorded sounds to be edited. There was a technical shortcoming that meant that we couldn't integrate sounds from the real world, but cinema played a very important pioneering role because it got people used to hearing a mixture of music, speech and noise on the loudspeaker, all on the same level. So he contributed to the fusion of this art of generalised sounds. 

When I first listened to your pieces, and Korwar in particular, they evoked a variety of reactions in me: astonishment (the Xhosa language, the singing of the orcas), admiration (the harpsichord imitating the shama), but also laughter (the singing of the frogs, the boar), and some passages in your articles are treated with humour. What role does humour play in your work? 

It doesn't play a major role, and only occasionally. I wrote an article called Un clavecin au zoo (A harpsichord at the zoo), but it was serious, in the way that humour is serious, i.e. with a certain detachment.