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Stephan Mathieu - Frequency Lib
(Ritornell)
Stephan Mathieu & Ekkehard Ehlers - Heroin
(Brombron)
Full Swing - Monolake/Antenne Edits 10" and Autopoieses Edits 10"
(Orthlong Musork)
Stephan Mathieu has over the course of this year made his name and his moniker Full Swing much more well known, popping up on everything from Mille Plateaux's ultra cool Click and Cuts compilation to the harder to find collaboration with like minded German Ekkehard Ehlers. On his latest LP FrequencyLib (on the Mille Plateaux offshoot Ritornell) Mathieu digs deep in to the dustbin of pop music history to find deeper meanings and hidden frequencies. The LP, which is a collage of 26 short motifs that are all constructed from songs that would on occasion pop in to Mathieus head, is an evocative world of digitized melodies and analog hiss. Occasionally familiar guitar lines shimmer and spit up recognizable tunes, as with "Some of Today," comprised of the Smashing Pumpkin's "Today," or with the last track, "Gut Nacht," a rendition of a Beatles' tune that Lennon would be proud of.
More often than not though, the source martial is hidden in a warm fuzz or slowed down to a glowing haze of its original self. There are about 10 tracks in the middle of the LP that bleed into each other, creating an ambient collage of cooled out digital bliss that cracks and skips through each ones short existence. It's breathtaking to say the least, and at times so quit and simple that you get the feeling if you move too much you might miss something.
With his collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers, Mathieu finds a much more literal approach to song production. The first (and last) track, "New Years Eve," features a strong, almost giddy keyboard melody set to a back-drop of recorded fireworks. The result is an evocative introduction that leads us into a world of acoustic instruments turned inside out and upside down. Keyboards' suspended melodies drone atop beds of analog hiss. Digital production definitely plays its part on this LP, but Ehlers and Mathieu seem less concerned with hiding the human figure, and instead just blur it a bit.
It does have its overtly computer moments though, and tracks such as "Herz" and the stunning "Vinnies Theme" serve to exemplify the Duo's fascination with the glitch. Overall though, the success of this CD is not about one production method or the other, but their ability to find a common ground between the two. Live instrumentation and using the studio as an instrument become one, allowing the duo to create a world that is wholly their own.
Under the moniker Full Swing, Mathieu's sounds and techniques change very little. His latest offering is a series of 10" records entitled Edits, on San Francisco's Orthlong Musork label (co-run by Kit Clayton), each one being a remix of another artist or group's material. The first in the series features reworkings of Antenne and Monolake, and the second features edits of Autopoieses material (a group in which Ehlers is a member). Again, Mathieu leaves behind only trace elements of the original track, exploiting small portions of sound and exhausting every possibility within each. In the case of the Autopoieses, "c[]EDIT," the source martial was a blank side of vinyl, containing no musical information whatsoever. The result is a collection of sine wave drones that lay behind the computer-baked artifacts of the analog medium. The flip side is again comprised of vinyl, only this time a locked groove. It folds into itself in an underwater bath of hard drive noise that recalls the glory days of Markus Pop. The Antenne remix comes off like a recording of an improvising drummer playing a kit of static, while the Monolake track is ramped with layers of off kilter percussion. Both tracks serve to exemplify Mathieu's love for his first instrument, the drum kit.
Although the computer plays a large part in all of Mathieu's productions, his appeal is in his sense of acoustics. His reliance on played instruments and analog media as a jumping off point has produced a body of work that is hardly ever cold and calculated. Instead it glows warm, and always invites us all in.
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