Stephan Mathieu
How strange is this? Around the turn of the new millenium, there was a huge surge of electronic music. New artists were being spawned here and there (with Germany being a huge export, usually shipping them out in bulk). There was some truly incredible music being released by "home producers". It was really liberating to think that just about anyone could make music from their homes with the need of a huge amount of equipment. Me and a close friend were very enthusiastic about all of this and decided to have a go at making our own music (he already had a background and some equipment). So there we are, trying to put some sounds together in his basement, me going back home with a Roland MC-505 and slowly figuring out it's intriquecies. Eventually some tracks were put together after a lot of hard work. It sounded not too shabby considering how new we were at composing, but besides a few very skeletal pieces, the project never went further. The strange thing is that during this period of struggle to make something out of nothing in the electronic music scene, a german artist with a peculiar name was slowly arising in the very same scene. His name contained contained both me and my friend's first names : Stephan Mathieu. Ok, so it's not all that strange, but it felt kind of eery at the time.
And unfortunately for us, he was making some quite interesting music. I bought a few albums and really enjoyed his bizarre manipulation of existing music and sounds. Nothing was too sacred it seemed: classical piano pieces, The Smashing Pumpkins, A Charlie Brown Christmas, anything... and the results were always surprising, in a minimal, broken electronics kind of way. I haven't really followed his career much since then, but I have downloaded a few of his albums , all of which I found quite interesting. However, at the time, I was concentrated on finding obscure psychedelic rock artists and getting their stuff, so I never came around to actually buying his records. One of these downloads however impressed me enough to eventually hunt it down a few years later: Heroin, his incredible collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers. I have fallen in love with his work all over again and have promised myself to get some more eventually.
HeroinLabel: Brombron Release: 2001 Format: CD Cat. no: BROMBRON02 |
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