Bruno Serrou: You describe the following Quatre phonographies de l'eau as cinema for the ear. What do you mean by this?

François-Bernard Mâche: I coined the term phonography in the early 1960s, after discovering the films of Walter Ruttmann, a German film-maker who had made cinema for the ear by discovering the possibilities of talking pictures in 1931-1932. He had made Week-end (Wochenende) using only a black screen and a montage of noises to accompany Saturday night activities. Very popular at the time, this process was forgotten until the emergence of musique concrète, which used noises as a starting point. But Schaeffer was not in favour of this relationship, since his main idea was to make us forget the origin of the sounds used, in contrast to Ruttmann's Wochenende, which claims this origin and tells a story with sounds alone. I thought it was possible to make music the equivalent of what photography has become, an authentic art form. Phonography has never reached a comparable level, but there are still people today who specialise in this field, designing recorded soundscapes, for example. Luc Ferrari did it before me in his landscapes he called Presque rien. In 1960, I was content to evoke the possibility, but I also used, occasionally, as in Rituel d'oubli, raw sounds that were more or less part of this research. It was in 1980 that I systematically adopted this approach in Quatre phonographies. Each bears a title inspired by water or its inhabitants. Ianassa, a secondary Greek deity meaning 'the violet lady', lends her name to rain; Proteus, a sea god who takes every conceivable form, corresponds in my piece to a variety of amphibian sounds; with Regmin, it's the breakers of the sea; and Speio is a sea cave nymph. These recordings were quite laborious. I made them near my home in Greece, but the entrance to the cave was very low, so I was only able to get in when the sea was extremely calm and, to get a tape recorder in, I had to place it on a small kayak that I pushed in front of me while avoiding getting the microphone wet. The sounds you hear in a sea cave are absolutely extraordinary: there are rhythmic ebbs, various clicks, rustles, all making up music that I listen to live every year when I go back to that cave. I asked Xenakis to come in, and he was very struck by the atmosphere there, but he was uncomfortable because of his phobia of caves. The Quatre phonographies use natural sounds in the form of recomposed landscapes, concentrated into ten minutes or so each. There are mixes, tilings and a few rare manipulations, such as the sound of running water freezing and becoming the sound of broken glass.

Bruno Serrou: The audience hears nothing but sound, which leads them to reconstruct a film.

François-Bernard Mâche: Yes. Adding images would be a pleonasm, since the idea here is to appeal to the imagination, so that everyone can reconstruct their own landscape.

Bruno Serrou: This tetralogy was first performed in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon. Was it part of the Centre Acanthes?

François-Bernard Mâche: The idea was to accompany an exhibition on the theme of water, with my music playing continuously. It was a bit of a pleonasm, but the images were fixed and the music, by its very nature, mobile.

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.261-263