Imagine someone crafting electronic music by hand - pixel by pixel, waveform by waveform - as though engraving sound with a calligrapher’s brush. That’s exactly what French composer Gilles Sivilotto delivers on "Handmade", an extraordinary CD exemplifying Iannis Xenakis’s idea that “if God existed, He would be a handyman”. Sivilotto draws every waveform by hand using an electronic pencil - a painstaking process that transforms sculptural labour into listening art.

Raised in a Mediterranean fishing family, Sivilotto is accustomed to manual toil; this sensibility permeates his sound structures. Each sonic gesture is tempered by the mind’s intimacy and the hand’s inescapable imperfection - the very space where emotion enters calculation. Weeks, months, maybe years of drawing culminate in minutes of electronic breath, tension, and release.

Rather than presenting a single vision, the album offers "three" perspectives on the same motifs. It opens with Handmade03, the original electronic version - precise, crystalline, almost sterile in its purity. Seconds later, IsabelleDuthoit reinterprets it with her voice, navigating the electronic blueprint as though it were ancient runes turned vocal incantation - glossolalia as architecture, humanizing every glitch.

Then comes Handmade02, reimagined by zeitkratzer, the ensemble noted for disarming distinctions between rock, noise, and classical idioms. Their nearly 16-minute setting is lush and theatrical: clarinet, horns, strings, percussion - all weaving Sivilotto’s electronic skeleton into living, breathing flesh. The result is neither cover nor translation, but an autonomous organism - intelligent, sensual, and subtly theatrical.

The CD comes in a thoughtful digipack, complete with an eight-page booklet revealing Sivilotto’s waveform drawings - visual sound sculptures you can both see and hear. It’s an art object that insists you slow down, study the grain.

This project matters precisely because of its triangulation: solo electronics, solo voice, ensemble interplay. It invites listeners to compare and cherish each version - mechanical, vocal, instrumental - as equal yet distinct inhabitants of the same sonic universe.