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______________________________________________________________________________.
Stephan Mathieu
The Sad Mac
______________________________________________________________________________.
.date Feb-14-2005
.style Electronic
.label Headz
.cat.no. vector4/HEADZ33
.source CDDA
.type Album
.quality VBRkbps 44.1hz Joint-Stereo
.size 70,8 MB
______________________________________________________________________________.
Stephan Mathieu has worked worldwide as an improvising drummer, notably
with German group Stol and Butch Morris' conduction ensembles. In
addition to releasing works under his own name on numerous labels
worldwide, he has also released works under the moniker Full Swing. His
recent work has been closely associated with the digital processing of
acoustic events - indeed he has been described as "the Caspar David
Friedrich of digital music" - 'The Sad Mac', however, sees him
developing his approach of painting wide digital landscapes with sound
and supplementing it with a range of processes both ancient and modern.
Mathieu has worked as a guest lecturer at the Bauhaus University,
Weimar; The Royal Academy of Art in Gothenburg; the Merz Akademy,
Stuttgart; and currently teaches digital arts and conception at the
Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Saarbr?ken, Germany.
'The Sad Mac' follows 'Wurmloch Variationen' [Ritornell, 2000],
'frequencyLib' [Ritornell, 2001] and 'Full Swing Edits' [Orthlorng
Musork, 2000-2002]. All received widespread critical acclaim with
'frequencyLib',in particular, being shortlisted in The Wire's '2001
Rewind List' as one of the best electronica CDs of 2001.
'The Sad Mac' signals a subtle shift in direction for Mathieu, with his
considerable digital skills now supplemented with recordings of
remarkable gentleness, careful edits and even a re-recording onto wax
cylinder of 'Tinfoil Star (Recording Angles)' utilising a 1909 Edison
'Fireside' phonograph. The latter paradoxically encompasses all the
'requirements' of a contemporary piece of 'laptop music' with noise,
crackle, aspects of recordings, glitch and dub.
The result is a classic album featuring eight substantial pieces with
introduction, interludes, coda and outro. Warm swells of sound are
gathered throughout - gently maintained, they drift as if floating on
lazy currents of air before dying periodically, softly and slowly. A
pump organ plays a melancholy motor's endless drone underpinning vocal
fragments in shrouded Italian. Gusts of melody drenched in sunlight
sparkle as they smoulder like the warm embers of a late night.
http://www.ontonson.com/headz/vectors/release_e/headz33.html
Why is Mathieu's Mac sad? Because the Saarbrucken composer,
house-husband, and university lecturer spends less time in front of his
computer screen and more playing with his children and tending his
garden. Bedeviled by hardware problems during the past three years,
Mathieu waves Goodbye DSP-Magic on The Sad Mac as he simplifies his
working methods to their bare minimum (two applications Tom Erbe's
Soundhack and Akira Rabelais' Arge∩phontes Lyreù supplemented by basic
editing techniques) and uses field recordings, Macintosh system sounds
(the death chimes, start-up noises), and recordings of musicians playing
traditional instruments (harpsichord, violin, bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy,
cello plus Mathieu himself on drums, piano, hammered dulcimer, and pump
organ) for source material. Recorded between 2001 and 2004, the album
marries the more hermetic digital processing approach used on recordings
like 2002's Full Swing Edits with the relatively more natural field
dimension of the recent On Tape. What results is an expansive and
affecting collection of what FΣllt's Christopher Murphy calls
pharmacological music that consolidates the strengths of Mathieu's other
releases into a single evocative work.
Regardless of the changes in Mathieu's methodology, instruments' sounds
are still radically transformed through processing, a case in point the
seventeen-minute centerpiece Theme for Oud Amelisweerd recorded live at
MUTEK 2002. Based on fragments of Handel's Violin Sonatas, Mathieu
alchemizes violin and harpsichord tones into a luminous lament of
crystalline tones that glisten, shimmer, and sparkle (a style later
revisited in the equally stately icredevirrA based on instrumental
fragments from Monteverdi). Similarly, while Nibbio includes a veritable
mini-orchestra (violin, harpsichord, hammered dulcimer, singers), the
instruments emerge as faint phantasmal traces emanating from a wind
cloud. On the other hand, Mathieu's pump organ drone and Italian waiter
Paolo Bisantis recitation go largely untreated on Smile. What
distinguishes the album most of all, though, is the rich sonic garden
Mathieu cultivates: the prismatic glimmers of filtered viola notes in
Tinfoil Star, for example, sounds of his daughter Eva-Lucy playing and
singing amidst bucolic bird chatter (Luft von anderen Planeten), and
becalmed piano ruminations (Imagination). Perhaps most strikingly, he
even re-records Tinfoil Star onto wax cylinder using a circa-1909 Edison
Fireside phonograph, altering the original into an alien sea of clicks
and stutters that (as Murphy notes) recalls the glitch and crackle of
laptop digitalia. As distinctively packaged as its aural content, The
Sad Mac represents another fascinating addition to Mathieu's unique
discography.
Ron Schepper
http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/review.php?review=792
Special thanks to our friendly ripperman...
______________________________________________________________________________.
01 Anakrousis 00:10
02 Theme For Oud Ammeliesweerd 17:36
03 Nibbio 03:45
04 Smile 06:02
05 Portrait Of The Composer As Turbonegro 00:06
06 Tinfoil Star 04:09
07 Luft von anderen Planeten 03:15
08 Imagination 05:20
09 Tinfoil Star (Recording Angels) 03:15
10 icredevirrA 04:19
11 End Titles (150pt) 00:22
. .
48:19 min
______________________________________________________________________________.
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