Water Groove by Yoann Pisterman

Yoann Pisterman is a visual artist and multi-instrumentalist composer from the French Riviera who is now based in Berlin. Water Groove is his debut album (and the tenth album from Bytes), an impressionistic sound journey into waves, frequencies and electronic resonance. Yoann employs loops and repetitive patterns, interwoven between drones and melodic elements, to create magical, transportative music with echoes of the classic Japanese ambient and New Age music of the Eighties and the trippy Kosmische of 1970s Germany. It’s a tribute to some of Pisterman’s musical influences that, in his words, have “reached a cosmic sound quality”, such as Hans-Joachim Roedelius, François de Roubaix, Geinoh Yamashirogumi and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Water Groove is a calm and airy album, a relaxing, mesmerising voyage into Yoann’s joyful sonic ecosystem. For recording he used a reduced set up comprising a Korg Volca FM synthesizer, a Korg Minilogue and a Doepfer Dark Energy, along with samples and field recordings that were rearranged within a DAW (digital audio workstation). At the end of the composition process Yoann asked Andrew Claristidge (Acid Washed) to mix the album in his full analog studio in order to give space, dynamics and organic shapes.

In common with the Japanese ambient artists of that golden period there is a strong connection between Yoann’s music and architecture. The artwork is taken from a study by Yoann of landscape architecture, a series of visions and reflections put down using ink on paper. Whereas Yoann’s sonic palette is broad and colourful, for the artwork he has reduced his tools and the process. The aim was to make the person looking at it more observant, with the colours in the imagination of the beholder.

A French, based in Berlin musician and visual artist who is as enamored with ambient music’s propensity for auditory representation of architectural beauty as some of the genre’s pioneering greats, Yoann Pisterman comes from a long lineage of artists like Hans Joachim Roedelius, Geinoh Yamashirogumi, Ryuichi Sakamoto.

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