Video Premiere: Tristan Bres — Solar (The Making Of)

5 Minute Read

Music

Parisian artist retreats to windswept island with a van full of obsolete broadcast hardware. Things go as planned.

To the outside world, there’s a level of dedication that looks very much like a bad idea. Parisian composer and visual artist Tristan Bres packed his modular rig and a collection of salvaged 1980s broadcast hardware onto a boat, moved to a windswept French island, and proceeded to build an audio-visual system from scrap-yard oscilloscopes and repurposed CRT monitors. This wasn’t a stunt, but because the physics of cathode-ray tubes were the only thing capable of doing what he needed.

The result is Solar, the inaugural release on Field Tapes, the new imprint from the team behind Wonderfruit. The track has been circulating for a few weeks now, racking up views on the strength of its visualiser alone, with comments sections filling up with one recurring question: how is this actually made?

This short studio documentary answers that in full. What it reveals is less of a production setup than a closed-loop ecosystem – modular synth frequencies routed directly into modified video consoles, tape echoes talking to glass, the audio physically drawing the image in real time with no rendering pipeline and no safety net. The studio looks like a telecommunications relay station crossed with a physics lab.

Mastered in Berlin by Zino Mikorey – whose credits span Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Rival Consoles and Hans Zimmer – Solar is as precisely engineered as its process is wilfully analogue. Watch below. The wires make sense eventually.

Solar is out now on Field Tapes. Check the Bandcamp and watch the short doc below.