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 filmmaker 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 accompanying Saturday night activities. A highly acclaimed technique at the time, it fell into oblivion until the emergence of musique concrète, which took noises as its starting point. But Schaeffer was not in favour of this relationship, since his main idea was to make people 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 specialize in this field, designing recorded soundscapes, for example. Luc Ferrari did it before me in his landscapes he called Presque rien. In 1960, I merely mentioned the possibility, but I also used, occasionally, as in Rituel d'oubli, raw sounds that belonged more or less to this research. In 1980, 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 which I pushed in front of me, taking care not to get the microphone wet. The sounds one hears in a sea cave are absolutely extraordinary: there are rhythmic ebbs, various clicks, rustles, all composing a music that I listen live every year, when I can enter this cave. I brought Xenakis into the cave, and he was struck by the atmosphere, but uncomfortable because of his phobia of caves. Quatre phonographies uses 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: Audiences hear nothing but sound, which leads them to reconstruct a film.

François-Bernard Mâche: Yes. Adding images would be a pleonasm, since the aim 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 program?

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

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