One day, in my teenage years, I became fascinated by a Japanese print portraying a female musician playing the shamisen, a fragile, diaphanous woman, the signs reduced to the essentials, the curves vibrating intensely in the surrounding space. It was an aesthetic shock, though I could not really understand the origin of the intense beauty emanating from the print. From that instant I was convinced that a part of the artistic mystery was inscribed in a more or less distant Orient. The discovery, later on, of Indian art and its proliferation in South-East Asia, was to confirm this idea. How many hours, how many entire days I spent thereafter reading works on these far-flung cultures, dreaming of imaginary melismas, of unknown perfumes in sound and other delicate tremors occasioned by this incessant travelling between voluptuousness and spirituality. In 1992 it became clear I had to abandon my books and recordings in order to go to these places to check things out. The magic at once worked despite the difficulties of the terrain. My music was not to escape unscathed. From then on there would be a "before" and an "after" this trip to India and subsequently to Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan. The recordings on this disc show this immoderate love for the art (and not only the music) of these distant countries, the discovery of which gradually permeated my existence. An assimilated and especially respected art (as for Debussy in his day with regard to Indonesian music). There is therefore absolutely no pastiche in my music, nor is there any "musical colonisation" of any kind of non-European music, but instead the desire to share this overwhelming passion that speaks to us of a world that is more than ever topical. Perhaps also it is the occasion to excite in some people the desire to discover these types of music, especially as they are in constant mutation. (Claude Ledoux)