Stephan Mathieu

Stephan Mathieu (born 11 October 1967) is a German mastering engineer and former musician.

He currently lives in Bonn, Germany where he runs Schwebung Mastering, an independent studio for audio mastering and restoration.

In 1984 he quit school to study haircutting after Vidal Sassoon, a profession he followed until 1989, when he decided to focus entirely on making music.

Between 1989 and 2017, Stephan Mathieu was active as a musician, working in the fields of free improvisation, electroacoustics and abstract digitala.

His work is primarily based on early instruments, environmental sound, and obsolete media, recorded and transformed using experimental microphone set-ups, re-editing techniques, and software processes.

His sound has been compared to the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the work of Painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly.

Mathieu's music has been released on 60 records, CDs and digital editions, both solo and in collaboration with Akira Rabelais and Kassel Jaeger, David Sylvian, Ekkehard Ehlers, Janek Schaefer, Taylor Deupree, Robert Hampson, Sylvain Chauveau and others.

In 1990 Mathieu moved to Berlin, where he joined a young generation of improvising musicians and worked in several groups with Johannes Bauer, Dietmar Diesner, Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Toshimaru Nakamura, Rudi Mahall, Harri Sjöström and others.

He played in Wolfgang Fuchs' workshop group and the large conduction ensemble Berlin Skyscraper by New York-based composer Butch Morris.

A constant factor in Mathieu's work during the 1990s was the duo Stol with guitarist Olaf Rupp.

Since 1992 he has performed live in solo shows and at festivals in Europe, Scandinavia, North- and South America, Japan and created various sound environments for galleries and museums, a glass-blowing factory, a 17th-century garden, Berlin Mitte, a 19th-century steel plant, parks, an arrangement of 30 cars, a late antique throne hall and various other places across four continents.

Stol moved freely between improvisation, noise, and minimal rock, collaborated with various guest musicians and Butoh dancers and recorded a miniCD (Semi Prima Vista in 1994) and a 12-inch EP (001.010.011.100 in 1995) which was released on Kitty-Yo, Berlin in 1998.

The same year he returned to his hometown Saarbrücken where he shifted focus towards composing and performing music with computers.

In 1999 music label Orthlorng Musork released his Full Swing EP, a 12-inch record with two pieces made from tiny snippets from recordings of Stephan's drum kit, which were processed by DSP software in realtime.

Between 2000 and 2005, Mathieu 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 Göteborg, the Bauhaus University Weimar, and the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart.

He applied this working method to recordings of his piano and guitar playing as well as material by other musicians until 2001, when he changed his approach towards sound from micro to macro, from working with tiny sound fragments to extensive live recordings of acoustic instruments, which were now transformed in real-time using experimental microphone set-ups, re-editing techniques and software processes, culminating in his The Sad Mac CD, released on the Tokyo-based Headz label in 2004.

From 2005 to 2007, Mathieu worked exclusively with real-time processed shortwave radio signals and performed Radioland, an audio-visual surround sound piece, live.

His solo CD Radioland was voted genre-spanning one of the best albums of 2008 by music critics worldwide.

In 2008 he launched Virginals, a recital concept which pays tribute to some of the great contemporary composers of minimal, experimental and electroaucoustic music.

Interpretations of pieces by Phill Niblock, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Charlemagne Palestine and Francisco López are performed by Mathieu on the Virginals, mechanical gramophones, electronic organs and obsolete media devices.

Between 2009 and 2010, the audiovisual installations Process and Constellations were premiered and performed in Croatia, Spain, and Belgium.

Both pieces are closely linked to Virginals in their mechanical-acoustic nature.

Revenant, a new piece written for Virginals by Tashi Wada was premiered in June 2011 at the Collège des Bernardins, Paris.

In 2011 Mathieu started live and studio collaborations with Sylvain Chauveau, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Taylor Deupree, Jozef van Wissem and Donal Lunny, as well as relaunching Robert Hampson's Main project.

In November 2011, he performed a live rework of David Sylvian and Holger Czukay’s Ambient classic Plight and Premonition, which led to The Kilowatt Hour, a trio project with Christian Fennesz and David Sylvian in 2013.

The trio performed a piece based on poems by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Franz Wright during a series of shows in Norway and Italy.

Mathieu founded Schwebung Mastering in 2014 and has “collaborated with producers running the gamut of modern recorded music.”.

He has worked for labels such as Editions Mego, Important Records, Kranky, Mexican Summer, One Little Independent Records, Past Inside The Present, RVNG Intl., Sacred Bones, Saltern, Secretly Canadian, Sferic, Shelter Press, Unseen Worlds, and mastered music by Ákos Rózmann, Alessandro Cortini, Anton Webern, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Catherine Christer Hennix, Celer, Charles Curtis, David Rosenboom, Éliane Radigue, Félicia Atkinson, Fennesz, Grouper, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, John McGuire, Kali Malone, Morton Feldman, Richard Landry, Robert Ashley, Stephen O'Malley, Terry Jennings, The Caretaker, Yoshi Wada among many others.

Stephan Mathieu was born in Saarbrücken, Germany.

At 10, he started to play drums.

Mathieu's final musical work Radiance, a collection of long-form pieces, was released on his Schwebung imprint as a series of digital downloads and a 12-CD boxed set between 2016 and 2018.