Stephan Mathieu — Remain

There’s two ways of coming at this album by Stephan Mathieu a prolific musician from Germany. You can go in blind and listen to what appears to be a masterful piece of drone work, engrossing and enjoyable enough to warrant repeated plays. You can come to the conclusion that Remain is a 60 minute piece that sounds as if Stephan is perhaps using some synths and some occasional field recordings in a very predetermined manner.  Or you can go to Stephan’s website www.bitstream.de and read up on the method and execution of the piece and come away even more amazed than you otherwise would have been.

The way Stephan has created this piece is by taking Janek Schaefer’s Extended Play and having up to four copies looping in his house from various sources that are spread across three floors. So he has ended up with a constantly changing version of the original. Extended play itself was more than just a piece of music it was an installation that involved the same piece being played on 9 different turntables that  are set to repeat playing the disc but at different speeds.( It was a fairly involved installation and there’s a mountain of information about it on Janek’s website).  Stephan’s means of  having four of these records playing constantly is his way of paying homage to Janek’s original idea of an ever changing and mutating piece. Stephan recorded the sounds he was getting from these looped records by putting microphones in different location in his house and then digitally worked on the results using similar method to those he used on A Static Place (which Remain is supposed to act as a coda to).

The results are rather impressive. There is a recurring drone that appears throughout the piece and at times is superseded by other sounds coming in and going out but the original is always there lurking in the background. It’s a very warm piece and the sounds I thought were field recordings are quite possibly surface noise off the vinyl. It all evolves in a very natural way, layers of sounds at different pitches all coming together and slowly moving apart making a very enveloping piece quite cocooning in some ways. It works well in a darkened room as its slow moving nature and its depth and warmth give it a sort of relaxing feel.

Overall hard to fault this piece there’s nothing negative about it that comes to mind. Stephan is currently working with Robert Hampson in a reformed Main and I for one am now looking forward to seeing what Stephan brings to Main.