| Stephan Mathieu | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Saarbrücken |
| Genres | Electroacoustic, Digitalia, Minimal, Soundart |
| Years active | 1989 – present |
| Labels | Independent, has released work with Die Schachtel (Milano), 12k (New York), Häpna (Stockholm), Headz (Tokyo), Type (Boston) and others |
| Website | Bitsteam.de |
Stephan Mathieu (born 11 October 1967) is a German musician and sound artist whose work is based on digital and analog processing techniques. He lives and works in Saarbrücken, Germany.
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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.
During the last decade Stephan’s music has been released on 30 CDs and vinyl records, both solo and in collaboration with Akira Rabelais, Douglas Benford, Ekkehard Ehlers, Janek Schaefer, John Hudak and Taylor Deupree on electronic music labels worldwide.
Since 1992 he performed his music live in solo shows and on festivals all over Europe, Scandinavia, North- and Southamerica 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.
Stephan Mathieu was born October 1967 in Saarbrücken, Germany. At 10 he started to play drums with Ringo Starr, The Police' Stewart Copeland and The Skatalites' Lloyd Knibb as early influences. 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 after he became acquainted with the work of experimental percussionists Milford Graves and Paul Lovens.
In 1990 Mathieu moved to Berlin, where he joined the blossoming scene of a new generation of improvising musicians and worked regularly in several groups with Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Toshimaru Nakamura, Rudi Mahall, Matt Wand, Harri Sjöström, Sakari Luoma, Ignaz Schick and played in Wolfgang Fuchs' workshop group and the large conduction ensemble Berlin Skyscraper by New York based composer Butch Morris. As a percussion soloist Mathieu performed his own pieces as well as compositions by Earle Brown, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage.
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 Orthlorng Musork, a music label founded in San Francisco by electronic musician and software author Kit Clayton and video artist Sue Costabile, 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.
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, Philicorda organs and other obsolete media. In 2010 Mathieu started to work with several composers on commissioned pieces for Virginals which will be premiered in 2011.
Between 2009 and 2010 the audiovisual installations Process and Constellations were premiered and performed all over Europe. 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 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 long string of binairy code.
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, whos 500th anniversairy was celebrated in 2010, Constellations is performed by Mathieu and Mikalef on the Virginals and the 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 is spotlighted by 12 HMI lamps to create spectral light reflections in the planetariums projection dome.
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 and Computer, 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 David Sylvian, Sylvain Chauveau, Taylor Deupree, Jozef van Wissem and Donal Lunny, as well as relaunching Robert Hampson's classic Main project.
Officiale, an homage to German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel will be premiered in January 2012 in Buenos Aires.