We're overjoyed to feature 2 thrilling, long overdue vinyl reissues from the early catalog of electroacoustic composer, performer, and artist, Stephan Mathieu; his seminal 2000 debut, Wurmloch Variationen, emerging for the first time ever on wax, and Heroin, his follow up 2001 collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers. A deep dive into the crazy world of emerging electronic music at the dawn of the new millennium, both remain just as relevant and jaw dropping as the moment in which they first sent waves through the scene.

Over the last few years, the electroacoustic composer, performer, and artist, Stephan Mathieu, has kept us mesmerized with a sprawling array of archival material and new works, emerging at an astounding pace. So far, he’s been relatively quiet during 2020, but now he’s back with another hit of incredible work, a long awaited 20-year anniversary vinyl reissue of his debut album from 2000, Wurmloch Variationen, now emerging on Weeding, and its 2001 follow up, Heroin - a collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers, now receiving a deluxe vinyl reissue via Keplar.

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. Both through his solo efforts and his collaborations with Kassel Jaeger, Akira Rabelais, Ekkehard Ehlers, Janek Schaefer, Taylor Deupree, David Sylvian, Fennesz, and others, he has carved a deep path through sound.

Mathieu’s solo career began with a quiet bang in 2000 with the emergence of his debut CD, Wurmloch Variationen, issued by Ritornell. Comprising five works that were recorded during 1998 while he was working as a drummer, looking to integrate signal processing into his kit, and thus radically expanding the scope of his practice, it is a watershed that has helped to define the sound and temperaments of ambient music over two decades since.

While, with so much distance between, it is difficult to capture an image of now, when it was issued in 2000, Wurmloch Variationen stood in stark contrast to the context of European electronic underground music, largely defined in that moment by glitch and abstract techno, that it entered. Taking an entirely different trajectory and channeling the groundwork of avant-garde minimalists like Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros and Yoshi Wada, it is a work of environmental music; producing ambiences that consume its surroundings and augment space.

Built from low-lying drones, swelling synths, and shimmering piano, Wurmloch Variationen falls within an undefinable territory between personal, homespun sounds and a defiantly futurist attitude of the noisy experimentalism, rising a dreamscape of meticulously crafted aural landscapes that immerse the body and mind.

A truly seminal piece of work of remarkable historical importance that we can’t be happy enough to see return, finally on vinyl for the first time. Masterful artistry that feels as fresh and relevant today as it did the day it was made.

Shortly after Stephan Mathieu’s seminal debut, Wurmloch Variationen, was released, he entered the studio with fellow musician and producer, Ekkehard Ehlers, to record a sublime album of warm, soft, delicately crackling electronic music over the course of a single week during their Christmas holiday. Originally issued by Brombron in 2001, and then again by Orthlorng Musork as an expanded double-LP with remixes the pair had commissioned, this edition, returning it to vinyl for the first time in 17 years, is the first to include all 13 tracks from the original CD track-list.

Heroin encounters two artists at the dawn of an incredibly prolific period for both, each expanding their conceptual framework, Ehlers pushing toward his position as a true conceptualist and a meta-musician who interrogates the mediums and methods of sound production, improvisation, and distorting popular aesthetics, and Mathieu likewise emerging into his position as critical analyst and researcher, subtly and precisely working in the realm of processing as a method of intervening in melodious/harmonic analog sound sources. The result, born of sonic approaches developed from then emerging laptop technologies and unorthodox forms of experimentation, flowers as a deeply personal and melodic body of sound, built from minimal sound sources and slow intervention, that still feels like a world of its own nearly two decades later.

An album that embraces the happy accident, created from reduced, often catchy micro hooks that harness their own melodic beauty, Heroin is a truly stunning landscape of glittering texture and tone, comprising tracks that almost want to become pop songs but remain in a slow-motion state of harmonic nirvana.