Recorded by Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers over the single week between Christmas 2000 and New Year 2001, and originally issued that same year on the Dutch imprint Brombron, Heroin remains one of the great curiosities of early-laptop electronic music: a record that arrived bearing an ambivalent, faintly transgressive title and contained almost the opposite of what that title implied.
The album sits at a precise moment in both composers' arcs. Mathieu, originally a drummer and a co-founder of Berlin's Echtzeitmusik scene, was just emerging as a singular processor of analogue source material, his solo debut Wurmloch Variationen issued the previous year. Ehlers, a sharp conceptualist already operating between sound art and the late Mille Plateaux orbit, was about to embark on his celebrated Plays series for Staubgold, works dedicated to Cornelius Cardew, Hubert Fichte, John Cassavetes, Albert Ayler, and Robert Johnson. Heroin caught the two at exactly the threshold where dialogue between them produced something neither would have made alone. What they made was warm, soft, delicately crackling. Small analogue sound sources are coaxed into short, stubbornly tuneful figures that drift, repeat and dissolve, melodic but never quite settling into song. The effect is closer to a music box overheard through a wall, or to Satie playing on a jukebox in The Crying of Lot 49, than to anything strictly identified with the post-glitch moment in which it was made. Today, the record reads as a quiet ancestor of much that came after, the hauntological pop of The Caretaker, the looped decay of William Basinski, the dub-room melancholy of Pole, while remaining, in its own particular climate, irreducible.
The record's centre is Herz, an extended piece of slow harmonic drift here finally given its proper vinyl treatment at 45rpm, paired on the flip with a mirroring remix by Thomas Brinkmann that refracts the original through his own clipped, austere logic.
This Keplar edition is the first vinyl release of Heroin to contain all thirteen tracks of the original 2001 CD, expanded with the Brinkmann remix across an LP plus 12" set, remastered by Mathieu in 2020, in a limited edition of 500 copies with printed inner sleeves. A small, peculiar, lasting record from the moment when laptop music briefly mistook itself for pop.
