Nocturne 40: Stephan Mathieu

Stephan Mathieu, born October 11, 1967, is a musician and sound artist based in Saarbrücken, Germany. He is working in the field of digital art, mainly as a self taught composer and performer of his own music. He creates audio installations, works as a hobbyist photographer and graphic designer, and taught Digital Arts and Theory at the HBKSaar University of Art and Design in Saarbrücken as well as a guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Arts in Göteborg, the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Merz-Akademie in Stuttgart. During the last decade his music has been released on 18 CDs, both solo and in collaboration with Douglas Benford, Taylor Deupree, Ekkehard Ehlers, John Hudak, Janek Schaefer and Akira Rabelais. 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. Also, he is a passionate collector of 78rpm records from the 1910s and 20s, the era of acoustic and early electronic audio recording. As he states himself: "I love the way they transport sound."

Nocturne concert no. 40 will focus on two of his most recent compositions – "Les Chemins de Fer" and A Static Place". Stephan Mathieu describes "A Static Place" as a "journey of sound. Between 1928 and 1932 the earliest recordings of historically informed performances of music from the late Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque era were etched into 78RPM records. I used some of these records from my collection, playing them back with two mechanical acoustic HMV Model 102 gramophones. The initial soundwaves produced back then by period instruments like the clavichord, viols, lute, hurdy-gurdy are read from the grooves by a cactus needle to be amplified by the gramophones diaphragm housed in a soundbox. Those vibrations travel through the tonearm which is connected straight to the gramophones horn, which releases the music to my space.Here the sound is again picked up by a pair of customized microphones and send to my computer, to be transformed by spectral analysis and convolution processes. An imaginairy room, inhabited by all the spatial information collected on the journey is created and will be projected in a final instance into the listeners space." (Madrid, Nov. 31, 2010)

Stephan Mathieu has performed live around the world, on festivals like Mutek Montreal, Sonar Barcelona, Frequenzen Hz Frankfurt, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival in Rotterdam, Fylkingen 40! Stockholm and Atlantic Waves London, as well as in venues like Lampo Chicago, Phill Niblocks Experimental Intermedia New York, at Radialsystem V and Volksbühne Berlin, but also in historical monuments like the Aula Palatina in Trier or the Völklinger Hütte ironworks. Since 1998 he created various audio installations for galleries and museums, a glass-blowing factory, a 17th century garden, a 19th century steel plant, parks, an arrangement of 30 Peugeots, a late antique throne hall, and other places.