Stephan Mathieu (born 11 October 1967) is a German mastering engineer and former musician. He currently lives in Bonn, Germany where he runs Schwebung Mastering, an independent studio for audio mastering and restoration.[1]
"(In 1997), I worked as an engineer and teacher in a classic electronic music studio in France, the former CERM (Centre européen de recherche musicale) Metz, where I had set up an experimental analog lab around their vintage devices by ARP, Crumar, EMS, Moog, New England Digital and Roland, as well as a digital production studio featuring the latest Pro Tools 24-Bit audio technology. There I started mastering in 1998 – without exactly knowing that’s what I did – by transferring countless DATs and reels with recordings made during their annual festival, cleaned, edited, and EQed them for archival purposes and as CD-R copies for the composers and performers. Around the same time, I began a long journey of learning more about listening critically, frequencies and dynamics while attending many mastering sessions for my material."[2]
Stephan Mathieu was born in Saarbrücken, Germany. At age of 10, he started to play drums. In 1984 he quit school to study haircutting after Vidal Sassoon, a profession he followed until 1989, when he decided to focus entirely on making music.[6]
Work as a musician
Between 1989 and 2017, Stephan Mathieu was active as a musician, working in the fields of free improvisation, electroacoustics and abstract digitala. His work is primarily based on early instruments, environmental sound, and obsolete media, recorded and transformed using experimental microphone set-ups, re-editing techniques, and software processes. His sound has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the work of Painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.[7]
Since 1992, he has performed live in solo shows and at festivals in Europe, Scandinavia, North- and South America, Japan and created various sound environments for galleries and museums, a glass-blowing factory, a 17th-century garden, Berlin Mitte, a 19th-century steel plant, parks, an arrangement of 30 cars, a late antique throne hall and various other places across four continents.
Between 2000 and 2005, Mathieu taught Digital Arts and Theory at the HBKSaar University of Art and Design in Saarbrücken and as a guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Arts Göteborg, the Bauhaus University Weimar, and the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart.
His solo CD Radioland was voted genre-spanning one of the best albums of 2008 by music critics worldwide.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]
"Mathieu shows that that most functional and impersonal of musical instruments, the laptop, is capable of producing work not only of great beauty but of mysterious and powerful emotion."[17]
Work as a drummer
In 1990 Mathieu moved to Berlin, where he joined a young generation of improvising musicians and worked in several groups with Johannes Bauer, Dietmar Diesner, Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Toshimaru Nakamura, Rudi Mahall, Harri Sjöström, and others. He played in Wolfgang Fuchs' workshop group and the large conduction ensemble Berlin Skyscraper by New York-based composer Butch Morris.
A constant factor in Mathieu's work during the 1990s was the duo Stol with guitarist Olaf Rupp. Stol moved freely between improvisation, noise, and minimal rock, collaborated with various guest musicians and Butoh dancers and recorded a miniCD (Semi Prima Vista in 1994) and a 12-inch EP (001.010.011.100 in 1995) which was released on Kitty-Yo, Berlin in 1998. The same year he returned to his hometown Saarbrücken where he shifted focus towards composing and performing music with computers.
Computer-aided music
In 1999 music label Orthlorng Musork released his Full Swing EP, a 12-inch record with two pieces made from tiny snippets from recordings of Stephan's drum kit, which were processed by DSP software in realtime. He applied this working method to recordings of his piano and guitar playing as well as material by other musicians until 2001, when he changed his approach towards sound from micro to macro, from working with tiny sound fragments to extensive live recordings of acoustic instruments, which were now transformed in real-time using experimental microphone set-ups, re-editing techniques and software processes, culminating in his The Sad Mac CD, released on the Tokyo-based Headz label in 2004.
From 2005 to 2007, Mathieu worked exclusively with real-time processed shortwave radio signals and performed Radioland, an audio-visual surround sound piece, live.
Work with historical media and instruments
In 2008, he launched Virginals, a recital concept which pays tribute to some of the great contemporary composers of minimal, experimental and electroaucoustic music. Interpretations of pieces by Phill Niblock, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Charlemagne Palestine and Francisco López are performed by Mathieu on the Virginals, mechanical gramophones, electronic organs and obsolete media devices.[18]Revenant, a new piece written for Virginals by Tashi Wada was premiered in June 2011 at the Collège des Bernardins, Paris.[19][20]
Between 2009 and 2010, the audiovisual installations Process and Constellations were premiered and performed in Croatia, Spain, and Belgium. Both pieces are closely linked to Virginals in their mechanical-acoustic nature.
In November 2011, he performed a live rework of David Sylvian and Holger Czukay’s Ambient classic Plight and Premonition, which led to The Kilowatt Hour, a trio project with Christian Fennesz and David Sylvian in 2013. The trio performed a piece based on poems by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Franz Wright during a series of shows in Norway and Italy.[21]
Mathieu's final musical work Radiance, a collection of long-form pieces, was released on his Schwebung imprint as a series of digital downloads and a 12-CD boxed set between 2016 and 2018.[22]
Selected discography
Folio | 8-CD compilation boxed set | Schwebung 2019
Un oceano di milione di partecelle | Soundscape for a Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition, UNESCO Cultural Heritage Völklinger Hütte 2002
Vor "Vor der Stille" | Audiovisual piece for Museutopia, Karl-Ernst Osthaus Museum Hagen 2002
1745 | Soundscape for the Impakt Festival, Utrecht 2002
Die Entdeckung des Wetters | UNESCO Cultural Heritage Völklinger Hütte 2001 (permanent installation)
Cars | Audiovisual sculpture for 30 Peugeot 206 and sinetones, Saarland Galerie, Saarbrücken, 2001
Touch | Soundscape for a glass exhibition, Berlin Townhall, 2001
Betrieb | UNESCO Cultural Heritage Völklinger Hütte 2000 (permanent installation)
Aussen | Soundscape for the City area of Saarbrücken 1998
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