Stephan Mathieu (D)

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Stephan Mathieu is a self-taught composer and performer of his own music, working in the fields of electroacoustics and abstract digitals. His sound is largely based on early instruments, environmental sound and obsolete media, which are recorded and transformed by means of experimental microphony, re-editing techniques and software processes involving spectral analysis and convolution; it has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the work of Painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.

During the last two decades Mathieu‘s music has been released on over 60 vinyl records, CDs and digital editions,[3] both solo and in collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers, Akira Rabelais, Taylor Deupree, Robert Hampson, Sylvain Chauveau, David Sylvian and others on electronic music labels worldwide.

Since 1992 he performed his music live in solo shows and on festivals all over Europe, Scandinavia, North- and South America, Japan and created various audio installations for galleries and museums, a glass-blowing factory, a 17th-century garden, Berlin Mitte, a 19th-century steel plant, parks, an arrangement of 30 Peugeots, a late antique throne hall and various other places.

Between 2000 and 2005 Mathieu has 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 in 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.

“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.”