At the edges small flurries crepitate, then fade away and radiate. Mercurial layers spin out in slow motion from centre point, while new tones upwell and recede supplanted by a new set in cyclical recursion.
[Release page] Stephan Mathieu works with sources from the (often antique, here recent) past to reconfigure the acoustic space around the listener. While spinning Janek Schaefer’s Extended Play around his home simultaneously on a variety of sound systems, he reportedly became engrossed in the differing resonances and ways the frequencies interacted with the various spaces. He decided to capture them using microphones and repeated recordings and playbacks – methodologically and conceptually somewhat after Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. These were then subjected to spectral expansion through an entropic setup involving convolution processes. The outcome, Remain, plays like an extended mix of his contemporaneous release on sister label 12k, A Static Place, which it resembles texturally, while being more opened out and sprawling of habit.
Remain‘s re-imagining of Schaefer begins from quiet, open space with an arc of subdued vinyl clicks and pops hoving into dim view, sub-liminally alluding to accidental rhythm, mid-high register drones, with lower base tones gradually entering, underpinning emerging sounds, suffusing infinite body with dronus succulens in a spectral string suspension. Early on, it leans toward low-end swellings, with an undercurrent of melody, so oblique, though, that consonance might be a more apt designation. Particulate timbres with glints of light shimmer and fade over languorous timelapse string things, piano processed into otherness or subtracted – long droning gauzey swathes of soft soundswim. At the edges small flurries crepitate, then fade away and radiate. Mercurial layers spin out in slow motion from centre point, while new tones upwell and recede supplanted by a new set in cyclical recursion. It’s all in the texture, which lends a certain heimlich feeling – a comfort zone of sumptuous sustains – amid unheimlich concept. But it’s not just accomplished texturalism at work here; it’s also the art of emplacement, of which Mathieu seems increasingly the master; individual textures placed just so in the sound field, so as to aerate the composition, and the listener, over the long haul. The listener swims, adrift in time and space, as blurred audio-flotsam and jetsam from intersecting plates of sound move over each other. The cover of Remain extends the vivid red of Schaefer’s original cover, spreading it over the entire expanse, an apt signifier for its apparently monolithic surface which zoom-in strategies reveal to be teeming – with flux and mutation, and minute variations of tint and tonality. Overall, though, there’s little deviation from its serene demeanour, and Remain remains another engrossing chapter in the artist’s increasingly impressive body of work.
Remain is out now on Line. [Release page]
