Stephan Mathieu

Stephan Mathieu
Origin Saarbrücken
Genres Electroacoustic, Digitalia, Minimal, Soundart
Years active 1989 – present
Labels Schwebung, has released work with Die Schachtel (Milano), 12k (New York), Editions Mego (Vienna) and others
Associated acts Main
Website Schwebung Bitsteam

Stephan Mathieu (born 11 October 1967) is a German musician and sound artist whose work is based on digital and analog processing techniques. He currently lives and works in Bonn, Germany.

About

Stephan Mathieu is a self-taught composer and performer of his own music, working in the fields of electroacoustics and abstract digitala. His sound is largely based on early instruments, environmental sound and obsolete media, which are recorded and transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and software processes involving spectral analysis and convolution; it has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the work of Painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.[1]

During the last decade Stephan’s music has been released on over 40 vinyl records and CDs, both solo and in collaboration with Akira Rabelais, Taylor Deupree, Robert Hampson, Sylvain Chauveau, David Sylvian and others on electronic music labels worldwide.

Since 1992 he performed his music live in solo shows and on festivals all over Europe, Scandinavia, North- and South America, Japan and created various audio installations for galleries and museums, a glass-blowing factory, a 17th-century garden, Berlin Mitte, a 19th-century steel plant, parks, an arrangement of 30 Peugeots, a late antique throne hall and various other places.

Between 2000 and 2005 Mathieu has taught Digital Arts and Theory at the HBKSaar University of Art and Design in Saarbrücken and as a guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Arts in Göteborg, the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Merz-Akademie in Stuttgart.

His solo CD Radioland was voted genre-spanning one of the best albums of 2008 by music critics worldwide.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

"Mathieu shows that that most functional and impersonal of musical instruments, the laptop, is capable of producing work not only of great beauty, but of mysterious and powerful emotion.” [10]

History

Stephan Mathieu was born October 1967 in Saarbrücken, Germany. At 10 he started to play drums. In 1984 he quit school to study hair design with Vidal Sassoon, a profession he followed until 1989, when he decided to focus entirely on making music.

In 1990 Mathieu moved to Berlin, where he joined a new generation of improvising musicians and worked regularly in several groups with Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Toshimaru Nakamura, Rudi Mahall, Harri Sjöström and played in Wolfgang Fuchs' workshop group and the large conduction ensemble Berlin Skyscraper by New York based composer Butch Morris.

One constant factor in Mathieu's work as a drummer during the 1990s was the duo Stol with guitarist Olaf Rupp. Stol moved freely between improvisation, noise and minimal rock, collaborated with various guest musicians and Butoh dancers and recorded a miniCD (Semi Prima Vista in 1994), and a 12 inch EP (001.010.011.100 in 1995) which was released on Kitty-Yo, Berlin in 1998. The same year he returned to his hometown Saarbrücken to found a family and made a radical shift towards composing and performing music with computers.

In 1999 music label Orthlorng Musork released his Full Swing EP, a 12 inch record with two pieces made from "homeopathic vibrations", microscopic snippets from recordings of Stephan's drum kit which were processed by DSP software in realtime. He applied this working method to recordings of his own piano and guitar playing as well as material by other musicians until 2001, when he changed his approach towards sound from micro to macro, from working with tiny sound fragments towards extensive live recordings of acoustic instruments, which were now transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and software processes involving spectral analysis and convolution, culminating in his The Sad Mac CD, released on the Tokyo based Headz label in 2004.

From 2005 to 2007 Mathieu worked exclusively with realtime processed shortwave radio signals and performed Radioland, an audio-visual surround sound piece, live.

Mathieu is a collector of 78 rpm records from the golden age of audio recording, his archive mainly embraces raw gospel, jubilee groups, hillbilly, hawaiian steel guitar duets and early recordings of early music from 1900-1930.

Current work

In 2008 he launched Virginals, a recital concept which pays tribute to some of the great contemporary composers of minimal, experimental and electroaucoustic music. Interpretations of pieces by Phill Niblock, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Charlemagne Palestine and Francisco Lopez are performed by Mathieu on the Virginals, a Renaissance keyboard instrument, mechanical gramophones, electronic organs and other obsolete media.[11] In 2010 Mathieu started to work with several composers on commissioned pieces for Virginals, Revenant by Tashi Wada, being the first result in this series, was premiered in June 2011 at Collège des Bernardins, Paris.[12][13]

Between 2009 and 2010 the audiovisual installations Process and Constellations were premiered and performed in Croatia, Spain and Belgium. Both pieces are closely linked to Virginals in their mechanical-acoustic nature.

Process, commissioned by the 25th Music Biennale Zagreb, is based on Orson Welles' film adaption of Franz Kafka's unfinished novel The Trial. The piece is presented by an ensemble of historical media artefacts comprising four mechanical gramophones which play back a pre-recorded consort of viols, the Virginals played with five electromagnets, and two vintage 16mm film projectors connected by a 24 meters long film loop. Both, the audio and visual parts of Process are based on a text fragment of Kafka's novel, which is translated to a string of binary code.[14]

Constellations is a collaborative work with Buenos Aires based media artist Caro Mikalef and was commissioned by the Sónar 2010 Festival in Barcelona for three performances in the planetarium of the CosmoCaixa Barcelona New Science Museum. Conceived as an audiovisual piece dedicated to the iberian Renaissance composer Antonio de Cabezón, whose 500th anniversairy was celebrated in 2010, Constellations is performed by Mathieu and Mikalef on the Virginals, augmented by harpsichordist Carles Budo Costa from Valencia. For the visual part of the composition a large mobile sculpture was built from optical lenses by Carl Zeiss, mirrors and color filters, which are spotlighted by 12 HMI lamps to create spectral light reflections in the planetariums projection dome.[15]

During Stephan Mathieu's aforementioned excursions within the fields of mechanical-acoustics and media composition, the computer made a comeback for some live projects in 2010, namely his Music for Columbia Phonoharp, a project dedicated to the US American pre-war gospel preacher Washington Phillips, which was performed in several concerts in Europe, North- and South America.

In 2011 Mathieu has started live and studio collaborations with Sylvain Chauveau, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Taylor Deupree, Jozef van Wissem and Donal Lunny, as well as relaunching Robert Hampson's classic Main project.

In November 2011 he performed a live rework of the first live performance of the ambient classic Plight and Premonition, a collaborative work by David Sylvian and Holger Czukay from 1988.

In 2013 Mathieu focused on The Kilowatt Hour, a collaborative project with Christian Fennesz and David Sylvian. The trio performed a piece based on poems by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Franz Wright during various shows in Norway and Italy.[16]

Selected discography

Selected Sound Installations

References

  1. ↑ Bolognesi, Pia (March 2011). "Constellations and Fragments: The Sound of Stephan Mathieu". Digimag. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  2. ↑ "The Wire's 2008 Top 50 Rewind". The Wire Magazine. January 2009. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  3. ↑ Lockett, Alan (March 2009). "Beatless Top 10". Igloo Magazine. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  4. ↑ "Our favourite 100 albums for 2008". Boomkat Online. December 2008. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  5. ↑ "Definitive Top 20 Albums of 2008". The Milkfactory. January 2009. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  6. ↑ "Best Albums of 2008". Mimaroglu Music Sales. December 2008. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  7. ↑ Crumsho, Michael (January 2009). "Albums of 2008". Dusted Magazine. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  8. ↑ Covey, Ethan (January 2009). "Albums of 2008". Dusted Magazine. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  9. ↑ O'Connell, Jake (January 2009). "Albums of 2008". Dusted Magazine. Retrieved 21 Oct 2012.
  10. ↑ Warburton, Dan (March 2005). "ELECTRONICA: Stephan Mathieu THESADMAC". Paris Transatlantic Magazine. Retrieved 24 August 2012.
  11. ↑ Bitsteam. "Virginals". Bitsteam.de. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  12. ↑ Guitton, Maxime. "Revenant premiere at Collège des Bernardins 1". Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  13. ↑ Guitton, Maxime. "Revenant premiere at Collège des Bernardins 2". Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  14. ↑ Bitsteam. "Process". Bitsteam.de. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  15. ↑ Bitsteam. "Constellations". Bitsteam.de. Retrieved 26 November 2012.
  16. ↑ The Kilowatt Hour. "The Kilowatt Hour ft. Franz Wright". DavidSylvian.com. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
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