III HELIOSTSION MMXII

A STATIC PLACE

A STATIC PLACE
REMAIN
BY STEPHAN MATHIEU

SCHWARZSCHILD RADIUS
REMAIN
II. A STATIC PLACE I
III. MINUET
IV. A STATIC PLACE II
V. DAWN
I.

A STATIC PLACE
A STATIC PLACE IS ABOUT THE 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.
STEPHAN MATHIEU, MADRID, NOV. 31, 2010

A STATIC PLACE
BY STEPHAN MATHIEU
MASTERED BY HENNER DONDORF
PUBLISHED BY TOUCH MUSIC (MCPS)
SCHWEBUNG 2011/2012
DESIGN BY CARO MIKALEF FOR CABINA

A STATIC PLACE / REMAIN

ESSAY BY SCOTT MCMILLAN

There seems to be a quest in much of Stephan Mathieus work to disrupt the linear
nature of time, to capture a moment and hold it forever, to reach back to the past
and drag it through to the present day, or even to reverse the process of
obsolescence. His is a very slow and quiet rage against the dying of the light. I saw a
performance of his Virginals project (a version of which is to be released as an album
later this year) in Berlin last year, which saw him bringing not just the room the
crumbling old Sophiensaele theatre back to life, but also rejuvenating that
renaissance Virginals keyboard and a Philicorda organ. He made them sing in ways
their inventors couldnt possibly have dreamed of, via versions of pieces by the likes
of Charlemagne Palestine and Alvin Lucier.

The rst track on A Static Place is even named Schwarzschild Radius, a term which
denotes the distance from the centre of an object which, if all of its mass were
compressed into that space, would cause its gravitational eld to be so strong that
light could not escape i.e. it would become a singularity, a black hole, an innitely
deep schism in the fabric of space-time. If this is already sounding a little scientic,
consider Mathieus descriptions of his working methods on A Static Place: they
involve spectral analysis and convolution processes, which sounds like something
men in white coats would use at CERN to view the spirals traced by colliding
subatomic particles as they try to unravel the mysteries of subatomic forces. But,
gravitational elds aside, there is a much more human, emotional pull to this music.

His much-lauded Radioland CD from 2008 grabbed threads of shortwave radio as

they were vanishing into the cosmos, and span them into huge tapestries of sound,
preserving them for posterity in these new forms. But it isnt just about the fourth
dimension, as the titles of these two new CDs for the 12kand Line labels, A Static
Place and Remain respectively, suggest. Mathieu is stepping outside the relentlessly
owing stream and into new eternities where whole new rules of time and space
apply.

A Static Place is rooted in Mathieus passion for very early 78rpm records, which he
has been collecting for some years (I love the way they transport sound, he has
said). He plays them on, and collects the results from, his HMV 102 mechanical
gramophones, which themselves date back to the 1930s. There is a further temporal
dislocation involved here in that the pieces he uses on this album are recordings of
material from the late Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque eras, works dating back
centuries. And as such, they feature instruments which too have passed into

desuetude: clavichords, lutes, and the like, whole families whose voices have faded
to near silence.
Mathieu is pointing his microphone directly at the past to collect these ghostly
transmissions, much like an astronomer pointing a telescope at the night sky
to detect in its faint red shift an echo of a time when notions of space and time were
in fact meaningless.
As on previous work, such as the Transcription album he made in collaboration with
Taylor Deupree, he plays these records on the acoustic gramophones and captures
the sound via microphone, feeding it back to his laptop. Such is the extent of his
processing that you are quite hard pushed to pick out any of that aforementioned
instrumentation, their unfamiliar tones and textures coalescing into a spectral
orchestra.
Or even at times a chorus, for there does appear to be a voice deep within that
opening track, calling softly from amongst the galaxial arm of hiss and static,
and from amongst samples of strings which have been stretched seemingly
to perpetuity.

Another piece, Dawn, bristles and buzzes like a eld of insects in summer
breeze-tossed cornelds, as if a version of Gershwins Summertime had been
entirely deconstructed, all instruments being removed to leave only heat haze and
a languidity that seems like it could linger forever.
Layers are built up by Mathieu, not just layers of different instruments, but more
contextual ones which are bound into the very process of the works creation
in a different way. The section entitled A Static Place I feels like a room thick with
resonance, its harpsichord strings echoing into a three dimensional space and
collecting glistening harmonics. But which space? Am I listening to the studio in
which the piece was originally recorded? The room into which Mathieu was playing
them back? Or, indeed, the one Im playing them back into right now? When you let
these sounds ll your environment, you help Mathieu to complete his masterful
telescoping of a century of recordings and playbacks, of times and spaces, and you
nd yourself listening to something that is at once rather clever and very beautiful.
Similar notions are explored in the contemporaneously released Remain, which
is based on work by another of Mathieus sometime collaborators. Janek Schaefer
produced an installation for the 2007 Hudderseld Contemporary Music Festival

entitled Extended Play (Triptych For The Child Survivors Of War And Conict),
which was a musing on two births, separated by considerable time and space: that
of his own mother in Poland in 1942, and his daughter in far more recent and less
fraught times. A Polish tango from the era was used as the basis for a new
composition, which was then split up into its constituent parts and scattered across
a number of vinyl records, which played from clusters of gramophones around
the hall, all bathed in a blood red light. The exhibition was designed so that those
visiting it would unintentionally interfere with the playback, causing the records,
which were in any event playing back at different speeds, to pause, and thereby
extend, resulting in a new creation of indeterminate length.
Mathieu was playing the recording of Schaefers piece around his own home
on a variety of different soundsystems simultaneously, enjoying the different ways
in which the frequencies interacted with the various spaces. He decided to capture
these resonances, using microphones and repeated recordings and playbacks, much
in the manner of Alvin Luciers famous I Am Sitting In A Room, before processing
and further extending them into an hour long version. The original instrumentation
is once again well buried well beneath a shimmering ocean of sound, a piano briey
emerging above the surface at the thirty minute mark, a violin at fty; even the vinyl

crackle of the original is now just the patter of raindrops on water. It is again
the resonance which dominates, never still, constantly mutating, the waves reaching
peaks of room-rattling proportions before gradually falling back once more.
The cover of Remain retains the vivid red light of Schaefers original work, but
stretches it like a Rothko to ll the canvas. And that comparison is quite apt when
it comes to a piece like this, a huge, seemingly monolithic (it is composed of one
sixty minute track) construction which when perceived close up, as well as
immersing and overawing, also reveals whole worlds of detail, brush stroke, surface
imperfections and colour. There are a million shades of red herein, but all are full of
blood, teeming with life. But if it had been Mathieus ambition on both A Static Place
and Remain to, like Rothko, create a place, he would have overachieved.
He has done far, far more than this, with masterpieces which completely obliterate
the boundaries between different places and times, to create new singularities.
These are recordings to treasure forever, whatever forever means.

Scott McMillan for The Liminal

London Februar 2011

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