After issuing an incredible stream of collections featuring archival and recent material in recent years, electroacoustic journeyman, Stephan Mathieu, returns with "Mauve District", his first physical solo stand-alone release in a decade. Created as the soundtrack for an exhibition of the American painter, Helen Frankenthaler, at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, earlier this year, it encounters Mathieu weaving a truly mesmerizing minimalist work for piano and processing in real time. Immersive, stunningly beautiful, and high among our favorite releases in the composer's long and esteemed career, it would be hard to recommend this one enough.

Since launching Schwebung in 2012 as a platform for his own solo and collaborative work, the electroacoustic composer, performer, and installation artist, Stephan Mathieu, has kept us mesmerized with a sprawling array of material and proved himself to be one of the most prolific and engaging artists working in the contemporary field of experimental sound. His latest, “Mauve District”, issued as a beautiful CD edition by Schwebung, offers ever greater proof of this. A stunning gesture of Minimalism for processed piano, words defy its sprawling and immersive beauty.

With a practice built around the sounds of early instruments, environmental recordings, and obsolete media, each re-constructed and transferred through intricate experimental process, Stephan Mathieu has been an unmissable force in the landscape of advanced contemporary music since the 1990s. Through his solo efforts and collaborations with Kassel Jaeger, Akira Rabelais, Ekkehard Ehlers, Janek Schaefer, Taylor Deupree, David Sylvian, and Fennesz, among numerous others, he has carved a deep path through sound.

Following on an incredible run of archival and recent material that began in 2018 - “Trace", "Folio", "Radiance", "A Static Place / Remain", "FrequencyLib / Sad Mac Studies", etc. - “Mauve District” is Mathieu’s first physical solo stand-alone release in a decade.

Running to just over forty minutes in length, “Mauve District” offers a near perfect statement of the subtlety, constraint, and elegance for which Mathieu has become known over the decades. Working into a palette of sonority drawn from the piano’s tones, extended and drawn out into rippling harmonic drones, across the piece’s duration Mathieu slowly works in delicate, glacial melodic lines that unfold and hang in the air like the flowering of Spring. Bordering on the ambient, the piece is not only visionary on creative terms, but it’s easily among the most strikingly beautiful records we’ve heard so far this year.

A truly monumental return for Mathieu that leaves us waiting on bated breath for what might come next.