A Static Place
Root Strata friend Stephan Mathieu sent over his new CD on 12K recently, and it’s a real beauty. His description of the work is probably better said than anything I can come up with. Check the track ‘Dawn’ below.
“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
PS: Stephan asked me to re-up the track ‘Planets’ from his lovely collaboration with Janek Schaefer, Hidden Name.
Grab it here.
lovely. like m. feldman in the foreground and a big band playing down the street. looking forward to hearing more of it…
I was just in Other Music today looking at this album,
should have bought it. ‘Dawn’ is a beautiful.
Where can I find a link to this track?
I want to share it on my blog!
Received it a few days ago from the 12k shop. Pretty exceptional album. Better than Radioland maybe.
really good. I don’t remember his former releases sounding quite like this.