Stephan Mathieu, David Sylvian

Featuring: Fennesz

Mathieu first collaborated with Sylvian at 2011’s Punkt festival in Kristiansand, Norway, when he performed a live remix of Sylvian / Czukay’s ambient classic Plight and Premonition. “I’ve lived with Stephan’s work for many years,” says Sylvian. “After hearing his remix at Punkt I decided he’d be the right person to take an alternate approach to the Blemish files.”

“The recordings have a beautiful clarity about them due to their simple but sturdy frameworks, and their open-ended architecture makes them ideal for a project of this sort.” When Mathieu first heard Blemish, “I was quite amazed by the album, its dark beauty… . When David sent me the files from the sessions one year ago, they were a pool of wonderful material to me, detached from the songs and original album, while very much connected to David at the same time.”

A startling break from Sylvian’s previous work, Blemish is pensive and spare, wrapping a lyrical raw nerve in extended, drone-like song structures. Recorded in a relatively-quick six week burst, Blemish was “cathartic” for Sylvian. An earlier remix album, 2005’s The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter, took the material in varied and lusher directions, but Wandermüde puts it under a microscope. The catharsis of the original is tested and reinvigorated by Mathieu’s treatment, which he performs in real time.

“My work with computers is always live,” Mathieu explains. “I’m feeding selected material into a software process and record the output, which I either take as is, or discard completely. I don’t multi-track, edit or re-arrange, I’m interested in self-evolving sound with all its rough and sometimes faulty qualities. I never use effects like artificial reverb in my music, so what you hear is rather a piling up of spaces that surround the individual inputs used for my processes.