After meeting at the MUTEK Festival in 2002, sharing the bills on various festivals all over the world and a previous collaborative effort in 2003 along with Radbound Mens and Timeblind (“Quality Hotel” out on the Mutek label), Stephan Mathieu and Janeck Schaefer decided to spend some days together in the home of a classical composer in the English countryside and there they recorded a huge amount of material that they later reprocessed and assembled in York Music Research Center. Basically Mathieu plays all the instruments and Schaefer does all the field recordings and in most of the tracks you can recognize both artist’s distinctive trademarks but sometimes the symbiosis works so well and results in a new, unorthodox glitch-psychedelia. The highlight here is the sixth track called “Quartet for Flute, Piano and Cello”, where you can hear pops and crackles of a worn-out vinyl over a complex sound patchwork somehow resembling Ehlers’ “Plays” series. Due to its amazing sound quality it surely sounds better through loudspeakers rather than headphones. Recommended.
Andrea Vercesi